Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Trans Ideology Harming Transsexuals?" with Dana Beyer

Transcript

"Is Trans Ideology Harming Transsexuals?" with Dana Beyer · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, here's a dangerous question
• 0:06
  for you, what happens if you openly disagree with modern gender queer non-binary theories
• 0:16
  of sex and gender and even trickier question for you, what happens if you disagree with
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  those theories and you're also a medical doctor and here's a bigger question for you, what
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  happens if you disagree with those theories and you're also a medical doctor and a
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  transexual yourself, in fact one of the most important trans activists in America, Dana
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  Bayer is just such a person, one of the most influential and effective trans activists
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  in history, she's a medical doctor, she herself described transsexual which sort of hits
• 0:49
  the ear in a funny way these days, the word transsexual, it sounds a bit old fashioned,
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  maybe even a bit pejorative, but according to Dr. Bayer, it describes a real medical condition
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  where your brain has the opposite sex from your body and always has and you've been
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  sure of this from an early age, Dr. Bayer believes this is related to intersex conditions
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  and that intersex and transexualism should be categorised medically in a way that deserves
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  treatment and compassion but are distinct from the current mood that we have for assuming
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  that anybody who feels like their gender might be fluid or non-binary has the same essentially
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  seat at the table as traditional transexuals like herself, she believes that transexuals
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  are threatened under threat harmed by newer genderqueer non-binary theories of sex, she
• 1:45
  is no stranger to fighting on behalf of trans rights and she has met with Barack Obama,
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  she's met with Michelle Obama, she's met with Hillary Clinton, she's met with Bernie Sanders,
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  she met with Joe Biden, she's achieved landmark wins for LGBT rights and today she has concerns
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  about modern gender theory, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did this conversation with
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  the one the only, Dr. Danko Bayer.
• 2:11
  How are you doing, the French match or something, is that why you were late?
• 2:15
  No, no, I was bundling children into the car and trying to avoid getting into another
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  fight with my six year old daughter who is at a stage where she is refusing daddy cuddles
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  when I want to be having an argument, it's one of those strange things where I'm just
• 2:38
  to mess at the moment, I get it, I have an eight and seven year old granddaughter and a ten
• 2:43
  month old, I just get out of them, so I know it's like usually whenever up until this trip,
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  whenever I come to the door, they both run out, they grab me by the legs, and I know I
• 2:54
  know how to read, I know how to do this and that, this time nothing, and I get out of my daughter
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  and lie, I said, what's with this, she goes, that's why we had the third one.
• 3:04
  Don't worry, the same thing's going to happen to the third one, it's only a matter of time.
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  At least you have it for a six year old boy then I'll be dead, I'll be like Joe, you know, it's like
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  it's, it's one of, she's sick at the moment, my daughter, she's just got a chest cough, so she has
• 3:19
  to take the medicine, the take medicine, and you know, that's like that's a mole.
• 3:24
  Moxicillin or something?
• 3:25
  Yeah, arrhythromycin or something, it doesn't taste good like cherries.
• 3:30
  No, it's supposed to taste like strawberry, but the moment they know it's medicine, it doesn't taste
• 3:36
  good, you know, I even put it in like a little ribina. Do you have ribina in the States?
• 3:42
  You know, I don't know what it is, I've been, yeah, it tastes great, tastes just sugar water,
• 3:46
  but the, but it codes as medicine and so then like daddy's trying to force me to do something
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  that I don't want to do, it becomes the, the theme, and normally I wouldn't let it ruffle me,
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  but I lost someone who was very dear to me last week and it was her funeral yesterday, and
• 4:02
  Oh, the funeral was yesterday, so it was just two hours of solid crying, and it was beautiful,
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  it was wonderful, but what's that? You have my condolences again.
• 4:11
  Yeah, thank you. You spoke about her in such beautiful terms.
• 4:16
  Oh, thank you.
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  And you know, it's nice, I mean, you look, she's always terrible, we always suck up and stuff,
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  because nobody can bring themselves to bring up any negatives, but you know, it was good
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  to get to know her through, that's nice.
• 4:29
  I never have, she's an important person, obviously, in Australia and stuff,
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  yeah, and I got to know a little bit about your father, you know, that Hungarian immigrant,
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  names, right? So even though you deny being Hungarian, you're, you're a last podcast
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  that that the Patrick guy or something.
• 4:46
  Yeah, I honestly don't know where the, where the Hungarian name comes from, because as far
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  back as we can trace, which is not very far, because of, you know, records not being,
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  not being great in, like, statles in Poland, they were Polish, but who knows?
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  But yeah, I mean, it's like, it's one of those funny things, I know where you have,
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  you know, all of a sudden I'm like crying about my daughter not hugging me,
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  but actually what else is going on? Like, is it actually about dad? Is it actually about
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  Judith? Is it actually about mortality in general? Right, of course, yeah, that's, it's a,
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  and with everything that's going on politically, exactly, mortality in our face,
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  I've lost about a half dozen friends and icons from my youth. It's like my,
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  my childhood is just dissolving away. Will he maize dies or land us a pated dies,
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  Bill Walden dies, Jerry West dies. Oh, all within like six weeks, and it's like, oh,
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  another one, and it just reminds me, you know, they were only 13 or 14 years old than I was at the
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  time. Yet the more giants, they were, get the layout doors, you say in Hebrew, the giants of the
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  generation. And it's like, I mean, just, you know, 12, 13 years older than I was. I know,
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  those days, that was, you know, was huge in my 70 year old grandfather, like, we had an 18,
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  you know, he was, you know, he was like Joe Biden, basically, yeah, right? So, well, I mean,
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  when you thought he was ancient, he was probably 59, you know, it's amazing. So I was listening
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  to a podcast on the, on the free press about trying to encourage, you know, Joseph Stepdown.
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  It was a little history back to 1968, which is one of my favorite years to have lived through.
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  And I remember when LBJ got on there and said, I shall not seek nor will I accept the
• 6:41
  nomination of my party, you know, to run for president of this country. And it was stunning.
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  In 1968 was the wildest political year in American history, probably after maybe 1924, 1876,
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  but that's way before all our times. And so people would ask me this year because I've been
• 7:00
  involved politically for a long time that say, well, Dan, what do you think? Who's going to win,
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  blah, blah, blah. I go, I don't have a clue. I think this is going to be the wildest ride that
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  any of you millennials and zoomers and even Gen Xers have ever been on. And lo and behold, on June 30th,
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  hit them or not. It's like three weeks earlier when the European Parliament voted, you know,
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  to go right. You did a beautiful sub-stack note on that, by the way. It's the most concise,
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  clear one that I've seen. I've sent it around to people. Yeah, this is the most far-right French
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  government since Vichy. Oh, fuck you, man. I mean, these are a bunch of people who are tired
• 7:38
  of getting stabbed by Muslims in the street, you know, just going to get over to yourself.
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  And it's it. So we had that. And then we had show it to debate. And then we had the first round
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  of the French elections. And then we had the UK election yesterday. And now we have second round
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  of French elections. This is wild. I'm telling you, this is crazy. I don't know what's going to turn
• 7:56
  up. I still believe that both of them may be dead by election. It's entirely possible. I mean,
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  if you were an actuarial accountant, you know, if you were a health data person, you'd be like,
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  well, every day that goes by is a is a day that we're dodging the odds on those two. You know,
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  you've probably read enough polls. And you know, we don't really trust polls ever since we want
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  to cell phones from landlines. You really can't trust polls. And I've done one for each of my four
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  campaigns. And it's it's crazy. So you don't really know what you're getting. There's this
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  fundamental systemic concern about this. But they have a category this year, unlike any other year,
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  called double haters. That's the people who hate both of them. Now, I don't think that's fair.
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  I don't think there are people out there who truly hate both of them or attune that or anything.
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  I think they just hate the choice. Yeah. They simply wish, why are we going through this again?
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  It's four years later. This is the it's a rerun. You know, we can check on Netflix and watch
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  old Seinfeld episodes and say, we don't need to watch this. And that's what's really take people
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  up. I think 60, 63% of Americans who just fed up with the choice, which I think is why when Joe
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  stumbled, they say, well, get rid of them. I mean, this is an opportunity. Let's get somebody new.
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  Of course, we want the same thing on the other side. But I don't know how to make that happen.
• 9:17
  But again, he's not healthy. And I, you know, his craziness, though, probably keeps him alive.
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  Whereas Joe, I think either has a fast killer cerebral insufficiency, which is very common as you
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  get older, or pretty severe Parkinson's, you know, his shuffle, his stare into out there. He doesn't
• 9:39
  look to who the person is speaking or to the monitor or the camera or anything like that.
• 9:43
  It's very reminiscent of pretty severe Parkinson's, but that raises the question.
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  Why isn't he been medicated? Why don't we know he's got Parkinson's? It's not that unusual for an
• 9:53
  any something-year-old guy to have Parkinson's and there are plenty of meds that work for that.
• 9:57
  And so he'd be whole a whole much better off. And yet, we don't know that.
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  And so... Well, presumably he would be on whatever meds he needs to be on, in which case,
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  the Parkinson's that you're seeing is shining through the meds. Well, that you wouldn't want to see
• 10:11
  him if he's if he weren't on the meds. But yeah, but if that were the case, it would be awful. But
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  again, I know how this works. You don't want to admit to people that you're not well. I mean,
• 10:19
  Diane Feinstein was the classic example from recently. I mean, that woman really was
• 10:25
  death warmed over just in the halls of the Senate. I would walk by and I'd see her and I thought,
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  maybe I should bring my stethoscope because I think you can use it. And, you know, there are people
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  like that. I watched Ted Kennedy in the months before he died in the Senate Labor Committee and I
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  watched John McCain in the months before he died. They both had a glioblastoma multi-format,
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  which is awful. But most people look at that and they go, I don't want to believe it, right? I just
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  I can't believe it. Even though, oh yeah, he's 75, 80, 85, whatever. And a friend of mine, Ezekiel
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  Emanuel, Arya Emanuel's brothers wrote a piece in the Atlantic going that, you know, the sad thing
• 11:03
  about this is not that Biden has this disease or that disease. He's just old. He's just reached
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  the end of the line. And this is what deterioration looks like. Yeah. And we all have been through this
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  if we have aging parents or the grandparents before him. We know what it looks like and we don't
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  want to admit it. And I can't tell you how many patients I had who simply refused to let go of their
• 11:25
  parent, even though there was nothing left there. So that's what I think you're seeing. Plus,
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  the fact that all the staffers, you know, if they, if Joe goes, if he just was, you know,
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  George, George from the race, they're basically gone on January 21st, regardless. They don't have
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  a future. And if he resigns, then they're out now that, you know, everybody is connected to him.
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  And some of his best friends have been with him since he started in the 70s. Yeah.
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  Since the, since the Declaration of Independence was signed. There you go with that fact,
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  right? It's a bent bent bent. I didn't say it to my friend Joe here. And that's like,
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  it's, yeah, we laugh about it. But you know, the guy said a hell of a career. And I know him.
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  And I haven't worked closely with him. But I know him and I have friends who did work with him
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  on the violence against women's act in the, in the 90s and stuff. And they really liked him.
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  He's got his flaws. He had his plagiarism with Neil Kinnick and stuff. I was shocked when I saw
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  Neil Kinnick still alive. He took a punch from George Galloway, which was very welcome. Of course,
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  you know, in the UK, like, she's like, Neil Kinnick, oh, don't bring it out.
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  People are going to start, hey, Joe, is this the guy you plagiarized from?
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  Then that's another slap. I mean, yeah, I remember when, I remember in 2007, I loved Obama as a
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  candidate, but I didn't think that Americans would vote for a black guy yet. And so Biden,
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  that was a Biden Hillary Obama race in 2007. And I was back in Biden. And I remember having a
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  conversation with some friends in New York. And we were talking then about whether Biden was too old
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  as a candidate, you know, 16, 17 years ago, we were talking, is he too old? And then as soon as
• 13:06
  it became apparent that there was some steam behind Obama, I shifted my support to Obama. But yeah,
• 13:11
  the guy is this guy. Fair weather, fair weather friend. I am a fair weather friend to Joe Biden.
• 13:16
  It's tough, but it's like, yeah, it's interesting that you say that you mentioned Zeke's point about
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  and Zeke was one of the architects of Obama care, right? Health care, the, uh, wonk. Um,
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  and he goes, he's a member of my shawl on occasion, just, oh, great.
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  What are you, just as an aside, what did you, what did you make some years ago of his pledge that
• 13:40
  he was going to refuse, uh, medical treatment after the age of 75? He was like, you know,
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  what? Everyone should just die when they're 75. If they get a, I'm not going to take anybody,
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  so I'm not going to be like, you know, we live too long, just pack it in. Well, you should,
• 13:55
  you clearly didn't listen to him because you gave your six-year-old or antibiotics right there.
• 13:59
  Yeah, exactly. But no, I remember that that we, yeah, we, we argued about it, many of us,
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  and then we laughed about it. I believe, I think he's 60 something now. I believe he was making
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  a point. And the point is, and he knows this because he's involved in, uh, financing healthcare,
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  healthcare financing administration, that 40% of the Medicare budget, which is, um, people like
• 14:28
  may 65 and older, is spent in this country on people in the last six months of their life.
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  Now, if we knew that was after age certain, then we could deal with it, but we don't know when
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  your last six months is. And so therefore nobody wants to squeeze that at all. So I think he was
• 14:44
  making the point that we do keep people alive for too long for no good reason. The family gets
• 14:49
  involved in its chaos. So he just said, no, you don't kill you. It's not like Logan's run. You don't
• 14:54
  kill yourself when you turn 30. But if you develop a UTI, you don't go in and get an antibiotic for it.
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  You let nature take its course. If you get pneumonia, which was in my day in medical school,
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  the old man's best friend, because if you had a tumor or something, and then you got pneumococcal
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  pneumonia, you were dead within three days, and you didn't suffer for the next six months, sort of.
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  But we can't even talk about that. Yeah. And it's like talking about obesity.
• 15:19
  Dana, do you know a tool go wonders book being mortal? Yeah. I thought that was the best stuff.
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  The best encapsulation I've read of that argument that basically like we are relentlessly
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  psychopathically fixated on fixing fixing fixing fixing fixing fixing and we have no respect for
• 15:37
  the sort of the human soul component of aging and death that we're institutionalizing and
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  medicalizing every and squeezing out every last day of survival and ignoring like the context.
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  But I can tell you already. So I just came from both my kids, the one with the three grand
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  daughters and the one who's about to get married. And the one who's about to get married
• 15:59
  as told me repeatedly goes, you know, I really don't want you to die. So he got me an apple watch
• 16:05
  to make sure I work out and stuff like that so he can track me. But I feel that. But I try to tell
• 16:11
  him my time will come. And when it comes, I have prepared you as best I could. I think you're doing
• 16:16
  great. You don't need me. So he said, okay, there's a book called 300 questions to ask your parents
• 16:21
  before they're dead. Something to that effect. And I'm going to start asking these questions.
• 16:26
  I'm going to record it. So I have that of you and stuff. And maybe you'll leave some words
• 16:30
  of wisdom like, okay, we can do that for the next decade or so. Just we'll just do that.
• 16:35
  I don't know. My parents died at 89, both of them. And I'm figuring that again,
• 16:40
  you mentioned actuarially, I'll probably live into my early 90s or something. And that would be fine.
• 16:45
  That's 20 years from now. But I don't want to be decrepit. I mean, I have my pride and I don't
• 16:50
  want to be in a home. I don't want to go to assisted living. I put my mother in assisted living
• 16:54
  because she was impossible to manage. You know, you get to a point that you say, I'm never
• 16:58
  going to do that. And then you do it. And everyone says they don't want it for themselves. But
• 17:03
  then everyone, when it comes to the crunch, they decide that they do that they would prefer it to
• 17:09
  death. Yeah. I don't know. Do you guys have, do you have a East and Asia? No. We have voluntary.
• 17:19
  It's a state by state thing because we're a federation like the US. We have voluntary assisted
• 17:25
  dying, they call it, meaning that the person has to do it themselves. A physician can't
• 17:30
  push the button, but a physician can assist you. And it depends. So it depends on the state.
• 17:35
  I know that in Victoria, where Melbourne is, they have it. And then I think we passed it.
• 17:41
  So it's a very, it basically you need two doctors and like two psychiatrists. You have to be
• 17:47
  of sound mind. This and that. You have to have a terminal illness. You can't do it just because
• 17:51
  you have, you know, clinical impression or something. It's not like it is in, it's not like Canada.
• 17:55
  Right. Well, I don't know what it is. Canada is called mad instead of that. And I think it's
• 18:01
  appropriate because they're now pushing people who are just poor or homeless to kill themselves.
• 18:05
  Right. And that's the criticism of some places like, I think the Netherlands or something. Yeah.
• 18:10
  Yeah. No, we don't have that. But we have the minimum amount that I think you could regard as
• 18:15
  being humane with all of the, the rules around it. It's hard to get it done, but it can be done.
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  I've worked on that in my state legislature for years. We call it death with dignity. And I
• 18:26
  had self determination at the end of that, which is the point that making it the time comes. You
• 18:31
  just want to do it. You don't want to have to go steal your neighbor's shotgun and blow your head
• 18:35
  on the bed in the bedroom. So you kids have to clean it up. But so my mother,
• 18:40
  who fell apart after my father died. And I brought her up to live near me and to be
• 18:45
  near the grandkids and stuff like that. She never recovered. She couldn't get over it. And then
• 18:50
  she decided to stop eating. She just decided to waste away. And she wasted away and wasted away.
• 18:55
  And on the day after Thanksgiving on Black Friday, we call it here, her sister came for one last
• 19:01
  visit and the yelled at each other and did everything like that. And as I ushered them out,
• 19:06
  my mother grabbed me and she said, why the fuck did I send you to medical school if you can't
• 19:11
  kill me? That was the first time in my life. I ever heard her curse in my presence, let alone at me.
• 19:20
  You're like, well, this thing will be hypocritic. Oh, that's right. But she was not listening. It
• 19:26
  was like, after all these years and everything, et cetera, I need you now. And I'm thinking,
• 19:32
  yeah, you know, if this were legal, I'd have a really hard time doing it.
• 19:36
  Yeah. You know, it's one thing to let the parent go. It's another thing to accelerate the process.
• 19:43
  I mean, it's so tricky because obviously I think about this in the context of Alzheimer's and
• 19:48
  other cognitive declines like that. And there's this horrible conundrum where I know for sure and
• 19:56
  had spoken to my dad about the fact that he did not want to end up in the situation that he's
• 20:01
  now in. And if my dad from when he was of sound mind, when he was my age, could see today,
• 20:10
  he would absolutely 100% say, no, it pack it in. Let me go. I've lived a good life. Let me go. Stop
• 20:16
  trying to stop it. But of course, you can't do that. So then I think, well, if I got a diagnosis,
• 20:24
  then, you know, should there be some legal framework in which we, in which I couldn't,
• 20:31
  could say, well, I've got this degenerative disease. And now while I'm still capable of making
• 20:36
  the decision, I want to call it quits. Yeah, there should be. It has to happen as we get older
• 20:44
  and as our last years become more decrepit. Unless my son works, he's in venture capital.
• 20:50
  He works with a lot of guys who are in their life extension, but you know, life extension with,
• 20:56
  you know, your full cognitive ability. There's no point in just extending your life if you're going
• 21:01
  to be an assisted living. So yeah, it's complicated. We have to we have to do it generally.
• 21:05
  It takes a couple of generations to do that. When you said you would pass by Diane Feinstein
• 21:10
  in the halls of Congress. And what capacity were you in Congress that recently?
• 21:15
  Well, I've been in, I guess it doesn't, LGBT boards. And my last one was a wider bridge.
• 21:28
  Have you heard of that? You know what that is? Okay, it's a North American, Israel,
• 21:34
  social organization, nonprofit organization. So I would go to speak to people. I was also a member
• 21:44
  of J Street, you've heard of J Street. Yes. But tell people in case they don't.
• 21:47
  Yeah, J Street is, or see, this is a little awkward. Is there, or was the pro, pro-Israel
• 21:56
  pro-peace pro-democracy organization? It was created 15 years ago to set it apart from APEC,
• 22:03
  which was what we all did for like 30, 40 years before that. APEC was the only game in town.
• 22:08
  It was the Israel lobby. And this is how American Jews got to speak to their representatives
• 22:14
  about Israel. It's such an APAC would arrange meetings and conferences and stuff like that.
• 22:20
  By the, by the end of the second at the Fata in 2008, it was clear that we needed here in DC
• 22:27
  another organization, which wasn't quite as right-wing as Netanyahu. He who became Prime Minister
• 22:33
  again in 2009. So J Street was created and has grown remarkably well over all those years.
• 22:40
  And I've been an active member in leadership. But, and so I would often go. We would have
• 22:46
  lobby days. We'd call them. We go on the hill and we'd speak to, you know, if you're from
• 22:50
  Maryland as I am, I'd speak to my senators and my congresspeople and the Virginia people would
• 22:56
  go to theirs. So twice a year, we would have these meetings and give updates to them from our
• 23:01
  perspective. APEC did it too. Every organization does it. Most elected officials spend most of
• 23:07
  the time raising money number one and number two, speaking to all these interest groups. Because
• 23:13
  individuals don't have much influence unless you're Jill Biden and Valerie Biden and Hunter Biden.
• 23:20
  And that's all these listening to. It is kind of funny to hear that. It's like, well, he doesn't
• 23:25
  care about this group or that group or whatever. It's like it's his family. But to get any
• 23:30
  influence in politics, you have to be willing to work in a group and build credibility.
• 23:34
  And so I would be there on the hill frequently. I remember watching Bernie maybe a year ago,
• 23:40
  and you know, Bernie's older than Joe, by the way. But he's far more intact than Joe. I watched
• 23:46
  him circle the Senate office building. I think it was the hard office building, you know, twice.
• 23:51
  I'm just standing there talking to somebody. He goes around twice. And then I asked, I grabbed one of
• 23:56
  his aides and I said, why is Bernie looking around in circles in this building? And they go,
• 24:02
  well, that's his exercise and stuff. I love it. I get that. So I would be there and I would see
• 24:08
  these things. I've been there and as a trans activist and as a gay activist going back 20
• 24:13
  some odd years, I would be there a lot. I mean, I've run an organization. I was executive director
• 24:19
  gender rights, Maryland, which is Maryland's trans organization. We work to get
• 24:26
  anti discrimination legislation through our largest counties. And after we did that,
• 24:32
  we went to the state and made our case and got a pass in the state in 2014. We will talk about
• 24:38
  this later. I presume I don't think you just want to talk about, you know, America.
• 24:43
  It seems to subsume everything else in this world. Why not?
• 24:46
  All right. But, you know, well, this is, you know, by the way, name dropping, Megan Phillips
• 24:53
  Roper is doing a follow up on her series. The first podcast just dropped. And the second one is
• 25:00
  due to drop later. I love Megan. I was I was not in it. She didn't. I wasn't part of the, you
• 25:07
  know, the witch trials, but I gave her some I consult. I do most of my work quietly,
• 25:14
  which today saves my life because most people in the LGBTQ plus plus plus, you know,
• 25:20
  what Andrew would call the alphabet soup. That community doesn't want to hear from me,
• 25:24
  but they do anyway. They have to. Whether they like it or not, but it's under the table. It's sub-rosa.
• 25:31
  It's not out there. I'm not on the screen. Quarters. I'm retired. So in 2018, four years after we
• 25:37
  passed the legislation, my board chair and I decided, okay, we accomplished what we said out to
• 25:42
  accomplish. Let's just fold it up. The way Evan Wolfson closed down freedom to marriage in
• 25:47
  2016 after Alberta fell was decided in 2015. It's like, yeah, there's a good reason for that.
• 25:52
  But then there are other organizations like GLAD or HOC that because of quote unquote capacity
• 25:59
  building, they have to keep these people employed have to find another issue to follow. And they
• 26:05
  just keep doing something and they grab the quote unquote trans issue and they've written it into
• 26:09
  the ground and embarrassed the hell out of most of us. And now we've got a serious problem. I did
• 26:14
  hear how they embarrassed. Well, you know, GLAD is an organization that was set up to do media for
• 26:22
  the gay community originally and then for the gay and trans community. So they would they would
• 26:27
  have people watching TV all day and they would note how many gay characters there are. How many
• 26:33
  homophobic slurs there were against those characters. And you know, we finally have a trans
• 26:38
  character on law and order. Oh, that's cool. Let's make a note of that and send out a blast and
• 26:42
  raise money from it. And then we'll have a big party annually and we'll bring in those celebrities
• 26:47
  that are supporting us and do all that. That was perfectly fine. I chose never to join the board
• 26:52
  there, but that's because I'm not a Hollywood kind of person. But now they are the voice of science
• 26:59
  on on youth trans, you know, medicalization. They're the ones that are out there at the New York
• 27:04
  time saying the science is settled. Like, boom, that hell are you really? There's not a single
• 27:09
  scientist or physician on that board. They don't know what they're talking about. It's pure
• 27:13
  ideology. And it's a shame that it's come to that because we used to do this work. This advocacy
• 27:17
  work. We did it really well. We were really successful. You've talked about that. I don't have to
• 27:21
  repeat this. It's been 60 plus years. Slow but steady. You know, just get out there and do it
• 27:27
  and persuade and don't harang and don't tell people their bigots and all the rest. And we
• 27:31
  succeeded. And we completed the trans movement in July of 2020 during the pandemic with the
• 27:38
  bus act decision, which gave trans people, trans sexual people, actually, the rights of gay people.
• 27:46
  And that was the first time gay people actually got their anti discrimination rights. They had
• 27:50
  never gotten them before. We got there first. Most people don't know this. I was also the board.
• 27:55
  You have a group called Freedom to Work, which was the employment arm of the LGBT community,
• 28:00
  where we were pushing for we called an end up back in the day. And now it's the equality act and
• 28:05
  stuff like that. And my motto was no gays left behind because we were the trans community was
• 28:13
  winning court cases. We only lost one appeal score case in 20 years. We just were winning them. We
• 28:18
  just racking them up. And we had to let people know in the community that, you know, you're protected.
• 28:22
  You live in Maryland. Oh, fourth circuit. You're protected during California.
• 28:26
  Ninth circuit. You're protected. There were 21 states that had statewide bans as such as Maryland,
• 28:32
  which is what I did on the state and local level. But, you know, we did that. But then it all fell
• 28:38
  on. Bans on what? Sorry, it was dropped down. Bans on discrimination on. Yeah.
• 28:41
  Yeah. So it was a systematic way of making sure that transgender people were included in
• 28:47
  anti discrimination law. Right. Which we call that all developed from the Civil Rights Act of
• 28:53
  1964, which developed from the Civil Rights Act 1957. But that was the big one. And you made an
• 28:58
  interesting distinction there when passing, you said, transexuals. And then you said, transgender
• 29:04
  and then court yourself and said, well, transexuals. Okay. So I will unpack this because this is my
• 29:10
  takeaway. So, you know, maybe your, your editors there will just put all that nonsense that we
• 29:16
  talked about beforehand on and cut this part out. But I want to put the conclusion up front
• 29:21
  because it is the most critical thing. It's what I bang my head against the wall. Nobody wants
• 29:26
  to acknowledge this. They know it's true because they do write things in their documents and stuff
• 29:33
  where they acknowledge it's true. But then they say, that's enough. We can now pretend it doesn't
• 29:37
  exist. And we're just going to move on. So for a hundred years, ever since like the 1920s, when,
• 29:45
  that's a hundred years ago. You remember the movie? There was a Academy Award winner
• 29:52
  who played a young trans woman who had surgery, the Danish girl, Lillius, was the name of the girl.
• 29:58
  I forget the name of the actor who did a really good job. Of course, because he's not trans. So
• 30:04
  how dare they let him do it. But he did a good job. Yeah. And so she was transexual. The Germans in
• 30:12
  those days, Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin was the deleting light of homosexuality and transsexualism
• 30:21
  in those days. And it was the language has changed a lot since then. But that was the first at that.
• 30:25
  I first, my parents first noticed this in 1952 when Christine Jorgensen came home to the Bronx
• 30:31
  after having her surgery in Denmark. And that was the first Americans ever heard of this.
• 30:36
  Eddie Redman, by the way, Dana. Eddie Redman, there you go. Yeah, great, great actor. That's what
• 30:42
  acting is about. It's playing characters that are not you, right? That's not your identity.
• 30:46
  And you can play it. You're so old fashioned. Acting is supposed to be about representing
• 30:50
  your the minority community that the actor is a part of so that they can show that trans people
• 30:58
  can perform just as well as the rest of us. You know what? I do believe that trans actors should
• 31:04
  be welcome into the community. But they have to act as cis people most of the time because there's
• 31:10
  just so many trans stories that you can have. I thought you're misunderstanding. It's only the
• 31:16
  straight actors who come play guy, not the guy actors who can't play straight. And it's only
• 31:20
  the reason you can't play trans. Not that actors who can't play cis. Yes. It's a one-way street
• 31:26
  of equality, Dana. Down under. Yes. Sure. It's like somebody said, why is it that only majority
• 31:32
  white nations have to diversify? Why isn't anybody asking Africans to diversify in Asia?
• 31:38
  To diversify and Muslims to diversify. Oh, well, yeah, you know, in Australia, it works backwards
• 31:44
  because the toilets flush the wrong way. Yes, they actually only have trans. In Australian movies,
• 31:49
  it's all trans actors playing cis and cis actors playing trans. Yeah. That is interesting.
• 31:55
  Let me get back to it. So that's the history. 1966, Johns Hopkins, very well known tertiary
• 32:02
  medical care institution, great medical school, opened up its first gender reassignment clinic.
• 32:08
  And I even showed up there in 1972. So I snuck out of college to do this. But I got scared
• 32:16
  because all the questions in the intake form were about having sex, the actual people. Back in the
• 32:21
  60s and 70s, whenever you said almost sexual, the first thing that came to people's minds is gay guys
• 32:28
  having sex. And when you said trans sex, what's the same thing? It was all about the sex act.
• 32:32
  And I lectured for years. And then at the end, I'd ask anybody have any questions? Yeah.
• 32:37
  So what's your sex life like? You know, what is it like? And I go, no, I was talking about
• 32:42
  biology. You didn't listen. It's like, okay, you know, it takes time. This is why you have to be
• 32:47
  prepared for the long haul. You have to just educate. And sorry, I was wrapped in a, when you were
• 32:52
  in college, when you're talking about this era, what gender are you presenting as at that time?
• 32:56
  I was presenting his male. So what sex? I was presenting as the male sex. And back when sex existed,
• 33:02
  it doesn't no longer exist, which is part of my issues why I said transsexualism to emphasize
• 33:07
  the sex act. Who thought this would turn around 180 degrees in 10 years, but it has. And that's why
• 33:12
  we're in the mess we're in. So that blew up. It was on time. And Newsweek, if you remember those
• 33:19
  magazines and people saw this and suddenly it became a thing. And then it sort of faded away.
• 33:25
  There was the Reagan Revolution and people shut the Hopkins program got shut down. But there
• 33:31
  were still people doing it. And then AIDS hit. And so we were preoccupied with other stuff.
• 33:35
  In the 90s, the national trans movement began. But we were all transsexuals.
• 33:40
  Now, I need to distinguish the no-menclature here of these different gender-variant groups,
• 33:48
  because you hear about gender expansive, gender non-conforming, all these terms. They meant one thing
• 33:54
  in the 70s, 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s and outs, they need something completely different now.
• 34:01
  And this is why everybody is confused. They're all doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
• 34:06
  They think they are somehow absolving themselves from their homophobia and their unwillingness to
• 34:13
  accept their gay children, friends, cousins or whatever back in the day. They don't want to make
• 34:18
  the same mistake for the trans community. That was great 20 years ago. That's not the case now. So
• 34:26
  transsexual is a specific biological phenomenon for which there is scientific research,
• 34:32
  thanks to our European fellow scientists. Because in America, you could not get any money,
• 34:38
  any funding, any kind of, you could even apply to write a paper on anything I need to do with
• 34:45
  sex or AIDS. That's just, this is a British country, you'd probably wear. So we didn't do that.
• 34:51
  So we depended on our Europe. I remember Nipplegate, Dana.
• 34:55
  Yeah, okay. All right. Nipplegate. Remember the X, the exposing of the Nipple and the Superbowl.
• 35:00
  Superbowl, right? After that happened, I heard a number of Australians saying thank goodness
• 35:06
  we were saddled by convex not Puritans. There you go, right. And they were right to a large
• 35:12
  degree. So we had to fight that, but we looked to our European ally. This is where they've been
• 35:19
  doing this science for 30 years. Brain science, okay? Cognitive science. They have evidence,
• 35:24
  posthumous evidence. Unfortunately, there's still no test for transsexualism. No MRI has the
• 35:30
  resolution yet to look at the nuclei in the brain that tell you whether you're male or female.
• 35:36
  We are getting there. They're getting better. The day will come. And then the movement will
• 35:41
  just lose its mind because they'll go, oh my god, you want to genocide, whatever. But speaking of
• 35:46
  this. Wait, unpack that. What would the genocidal controversy be if we were to establish a
• 35:54
  biological basis for transsexualism? And that's what I was going to get to because the few people
• 36:00
  over the decades who applied for sex reassignment, we used to call it back when sex existed,
• 36:08
  were transsexuals. This is something you're born with. It is a congenital disease. There are
• 36:13
  a couple of genetic issues, but they're small. I am a DES baby. You know, DES is.
• 36:20
  It's diethylstylbesterol. It's a drug that was created in 1948 in the hopes of preventing
• 36:25
  miscarriage. It didn't do that, but it caused homosexuality, transsexualism, female infertility,
• 36:33
  T-shape uterine, all sorts of abnormalities. And you should know about this because we dumped a
• 36:39
  lot of our, once we banded in 1971, 50, abandoned 1971, the company started shipping the stuff to
• 36:45
  Australia. I just, so you know, anyway, yes. So I'm not for that purpose. For other purposes,
• 36:52
  DES is an estrogen. It's a very potent estrogen. It's about 10,000 times as potent as estradiol.
• 36:58
  So and it crosses the blood brain barrier. So my mother took this, she miscarried my older brother.
• 37:06
  This was right after the war. So keep in mind, the guys are coming home from abroad and they
• 37:11
  want to start a family. They kissed their, you know, flames goodbye in 1942 and then they're on
• 37:17
  their way and it's three, four years later and they're in a hurry. And you know, women miscarried,
• 37:22
  30 to 40% of all pregnancies and then miscarriage. And it was a hard thing to take. So a couple of
• 37:29
  husband and wife actually at Harvard came up with this super estrogen, which they thought would
• 37:33
  prevent miscarriage. And they used it for, up until 1971, the paper that proved that it doesn't
• 37:39
  work to prevent miscarriage came out of 53. But, you know, doctors are people too or humans as you
• 37:46
  would say. And they, which is a few years in it, it's like giving your daughter who's got a,
• 37:50
  what, a sniffle or something. She's got a cold, put her on antibiotics. That doesn't work for
• 37:54
  providers. So, but you got to give something because you would lose your mind. Oh, you're not
• 37:59
  giving me anything. I'll go to the other doctor. So this is the way medicine works. You got to
• 38:02
  do something. So they kept doing it. There are probably, oh, I don't know. I mean, there are
• 38:09
  thousands upon thousands of people like me who were exposed to that in the late 40s and the 50s and
• 38:15
  were trans as a result. I worked on the research that proved that that was possible and presented
• 38:21
  in 2005. But that's, that's one type. And that's an intersects type because I had reproductive
• 38:28
  organ differences too, because this was a drug that affected my entire development in utero.
• 38:35
  We don't know what causes most of the other cases of transsexualism.
• 38:39
  The bend just to pause on the intersex question, was this a diagnosis that your mother was
• 38:44
  aware of when you were a baby, for example, like did doctors go, okay, there's going to be some
• 38:50
  issue in assigning sex here or was it subtle enough that you know something that you just dealt
• 38:55
  with, doesn't that also? I had to deal with it. I actually got the TDatrix community to recognize
• 39:02
  that if a 12 year old boy presents with hematuria or blood a urine, the number one thing you have
• 39:08
  to look for is a condition like mine, some sort of intersex condition. My urologist had no clue. I
• 39:16
  was tortured when I was 12 and I went into acute renal failure because of the complications when I
• 39:25
  started partially menstruating. It was, it was awful. I became septic. I coated. I had to be resuscitated
• 39:33
  and I came out of it at three weeks of antibiotics, but it was the most horrendous
• 39:37
  experience of my life. The pain was exquisite for about eight months. And I'm lucky I survived.
• 39:43
  That's so every day since then it's been a blessing that I was able to survive, but nobody,
• 39:49
  even everything I went through, they didn't have a clue as to what they were doing.
• 39:52
  Right. So outwardly, it was, there was a male biology, male genitalia, and then people just
• 39:59
  weren't aware that internally. I kept it to myself. And I suffered like that and I didn't tell
• 40:04
  my friends or anything of that sort. But you know, again, people make the mistake, although it's
• 40:10
  funny, even, even Joe made the mistake the other day, they think the brain isn't part of our
• 40:16
  bodies, right? So when we talk about anatomic and physiologic sex, we think about genitalia,
• 40:23
  we think about reproductive organs, we think about hormones, we don't think about the brain, even
• 40:28
  though it's an old saw that sex is between the ears rather than between the legs, right? You
• 40:33
  know, we all know this. And literally your sense of what your sex is, your gender identity,
• 40:39
  the original meaning of gender identity is between your ears. You know when you're two or three
• 40:44
  years old that you are a boy or a girl. And if that is incongruent with what everybody's been telling
• 40:51
  you or that thing dangling between your legs, that causes a lot of confusion. And I went through
• 40:56
  that and it's only when I turned 11 that I was willing to come out to my parents and they threatened
• 41:02
  me institutionalized. This was 1963. I don't blame them for that anymore, but it was horrific.
• 41:09
  And you had very few people though, like that, which is why most people didn't know if you
• 41:17
  brought it up. And my parents, I told my parents, they thought, oh god, this is just a psychiatric
• 41:22
  problem. And there's no worse shandas we say in Yiddish, there's no earth scandal in the New
• 41:28
  York Jewish community in the mid-century than people to know that your child is seeing a psychiatrist.
• 41:34
  So that impacted on the kind of care I got. I got the medical care I needed. What really pissed
• 41:39
  my father off when I coded, I arrested, they, I was in a Catholic hospital and they sent a priest
• 41:46
  out to tell my father they were performing last rights on me. And he got more upset by the fact that
• 41:51
  they performed last rights on me than that I was dying. But that's just the thing. That's a
• 41:58
  that's a very Jewish thing. Theology, trumps, biology. That's right. Well, you know, you've seen
• 42:04
  that. You've seen enough warm movies where, you know, maybe there's a, a Jewish or a Muslim in
• 42:08
  a soldier who dies. There, there was a Jewish body that was just disinterred in Normandy, I believe.
• 42:14
  It was in an unmarked grave of of Vermach soldiers and somebody found him and they disinterred him
• 42:21
  and they buried him properly. So this is 80 years later, 80, 80 years later, precisely. And
• 42:27
  somebody cared enough to do that. It does matter. We were talking about parents and stuff. What
• 42:32
  matters? You know, you're legacy. This and that. So this stuff matters. Anyway, so I work with a
• 42:38
  close friend who just recently passed away, another friend who died. Her name was Lynn Conway.
• 42:43
  You should write her name down and look her up. She's probably one of the most important American
• 42:47
  adventures in history. She created the chip that runs this, the VLSI chip, the very large-scale
• 42:53
  integrated circuits that runs smartphones smartphones. It's all the, it's the massively dense
• 43:00
  computing chip that runs, you know, the cloud and all of that stuff. Lynn came out. She was working
• 43:06
  in IBM. She was 86 when she died. She was working in IBM in 68 when she came out as trans.
• 43:12
  And they fired her. And then she decided to go stale and she just lived as a woman and she
• 43:17
  worked for Fairchild Summit Conductor and then she worked in CERUX Park. And sorry, was she,
• 43:22
  was she employed at IBM as a woman or was she pretending as a man? No, she was employed as a man
• 43:27
  and then she transitioned and so she came out that way. And so then she got these jobs as a woman.
• 43:31
  She was one of only two women in the 70s in Silicon Valley and she with her male colleague who
• 43:38
  got all the credit for it. Of course, Carver Me developed this chip which has revolutionized
• 43:44
  the world. And she decided, after she did that and she retired, she was a professor of engineering
• 43:51
  at the University of Michigan. She decided then she was going to get involved in the trans community
• 43:55
  though still subbroses. She wasn't going to be out and proud. She was just going to do a lot of
• 44:00
  research that she realized needed to be done and I agreed with her. It used to be believed
• 44:05
  back in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s that the prevalence of transsexuals and male to female because
• 44:13
  there were very few transmitter out was something like one in 262,000 people, which is that that's rare.
• 44:22
  That's really rare. That is rare. I mean, there are, there are, there are entire nations where you
• 44:27
  would only have one trans person if it's a quarter of a nine people person. Right. So, you know,
• 44:32
  that's it's like and we we're looking around and we have friends and the stories are all the same
• 44:36
  and you know, we know some of these people. I was the only one in my high school class but there
• 44:40
  was one in the class behind me and then one in the class behind me, but that was a thousand person
• 44:44
  class that we go and these numbers can't be right. And anyway, she and another engineering
• 44:48
  colleague of hers did the research and in 2000, published this online when the internet was new
• 44:54
  and they could put it up there. And since then, we've had demography done on this and we realized
• 45:00
  that the transsexual community, the transsexual experience, the transsexual biology, condition,
• 45:08
  whatever you want to call it, we changed it from disorder to dysphoria, but I had a lot to do with that.
• 45:14
  But the so we went from one in 262,000 to 0.3%, 0.4%, maybe 0.5% get the most. So, you know, 0.5%
• 45:28
  it's, you know, it's a lot, one in a couple of hundred. Yeah, and that's there. It's not a lot.
• 45:35
  It's not a lot, but it's, you know, you'll bump into somebody like that in your lifetime.
• 45:40
  Well, it's enough that if there was a disease that killed, you know, one in 200 people,
• 45:45
  I wouldn't be gone outside. You wouldn't, but also look, so this was at a time. So, you remember,
• 45:50
  there was a search for the gay gene, right? I knew those guys back in the 90s who were looking
• 45:55
  for it, never found it. We found a lot of the, the Europeans found a lot of the nuclei in the brain
• 46:00
  that did determine your sexual identity, sexual identity is much more appropriate than gender
• 46:07
  identity, but you was, these had sexual identity for homosexuality so we couldn't use it.
• 46:12
  Did that right? Yeah, you screwed up a lot of stuff. It was terrible, but I won't hold it against you.
• 46:17
  It was before your time. Why, why was Australia calling the shots about what you call
• 46:24
  sexuality? Well, no. This goes to the second thing. So they were, they thought we were rare.
• 46:30
  Then it turns out we were uncommon, but there were enough of us, and then we were looking for
• 46:35
  words to explain, you know, who we are and everything. And so we were only, let's see, of a LGBT
• 46:45
  community, like over the last, up until the 2018 or so, the LGBT community was considered to be
• 46:51
  4.2% of the American population. Like 60% of that's by, and 90% of that is by women. So
• 47:00
  if you want to count them or not, then I'd always feel sorry for the bisexual women because they're
• 47:04
  always complaining on my list serves, but you know, they got a point, but then the opposition
• 47:09
  has a point. The gay men thing was like, I don't know, was it 1.5% and the lesbians were maybe
• 47:17
  like a tenths of a percent. And we were, we were at most a tenths of a percent of the LGBT community.
• 47:25
  And we were just a fraction. We were 112, 112, but not a tenths of it. So 8% of the LGBT community.
• 47:31
  Right. Right. We're transsexuals. We're transsexuals. Right. So we were, we were the
• 47:36
  kid sister in the caboose and we had a fight to get the T appended and we did then 2004 with HRC
• 47:42
  downtown here. And so at that point, it was like, well, yeah, what about us, right? Because we
• 47:51
  are sexual minorities or sex and gender minorities. That phrase has been used at the time, but we
• 47:56
  were talking about, you know, the gay community had sexual identity and then they had sexual
• 48:00
  orientation in the U.S. that became sexual orientation. So we had to go with gender identity.
• 48:06
  It's one of those historical, you know, defaults that happen. You lose control of it and it
• 48:13
  just happens and you deal with it. But gender identity meant your innate sense in your brain of
• 48:18
  whether you're male or female. It always meant that the last 50 years since the concept has existed
• 48:23
  since tickering created it, I believe in 66 or 68. And so we worked with that and it worked well.
• 48:33
  And we started passing legislation. We would always try to piggyback on the gay stuff and people
• 48:38
  got upset, you know, Barney Frank, right? You know, Barney, okay. Barney, Barney really didn't
• 48:44
  want to deal with me at all. He was very squeamish. Just tell us, just tell us, remind us who,
• 48:48
  Barney, Barney was the first, Barney was the first, Barney was the first out gay congressman.
• 48:54
  He was out in the late 80s and came out though and embraced it and he became the leader of the
• 48:59
  community. But he was what he called a pragmatic progressive. And when I went to politics,
• 49:03
  he sat me down and said, Danny, you got to do this pragmatically. You can't be, you know,
• 49:07
  wild eyeed story eyeed, you know, Marxist lunatic out there. You got to do it step by step.
• 49:13
  And in order to get any legislation passed in Congress, you got to go through Barney.
• 49:18
  I'm Barney really just wanted to pass the Employment Non Discrimination Act for gay people
• 49:22
  because we were slowly making progress in the arts to do that. And the trans community hated him
• 49:29
  for that and such. But eventually, Barney embraced us. He called a session, you know, with one of
• 49:36
  his colleagues. We had an open session on trans and gender identity and such. And from there,
• 49:42
  things have improved greatly. And Barney and I are good friends now and such. He was a good example
• 49:48
  of how difficult some people have with certain issues, just the way a lot of people had problems
• 49:53
  with homosexuality. And then they had problems with transsexuals and such. So we were in that meeting
• 49:58
  with with Rob Anderson and he gets up there. He's the first to speak to us. He gets up there to
• 50:05
  go, you know, when I came out to you guys, you all thought I was weird. And he's looking around
• 50:13
  at all of them sitting up there on the desk because you all thought I was weird. And you know,
• 50:17
  if you can't fool me. Okay, you got over that. You learned to deal with me. You know, I'm not that
• 50:23
  different from you. And then he turns around and he looks at the trans people back in the audience.
• 50:28
  He goes, yeah, now you look at them and they're weird. Yeah, they are weird. You've never seen
• 50:32
  people like that before. But they're here. They're not that much different from who we are. I got
• 50:37
  to tell you afterwards, my anger at him for doing that. Rather than recognizing that was his
• 50:42
  way of humanizing us by pulling us close to him and saying you had to overcome that with me.
• 50:49
  It's a natural human experience. You can overcome this with them. It was very instructed. I
• 50:54
  could tell you the guy had a lot of genius. He had the same issues that people had. This is weird.
• 50:59
  I don't want to deal with it. But he was a leader. He had to deal with it. So we worked him and he
• 51:04
  got over it and such. So we were in those days, transsexuals. What we needed, what we wanted,
• 51:12
  was access to quality medical care. And once we got that, we wanted legal recognition.
• 51:19
  And there were all sorts of ways. And sorry, just to pause here, when you say access to
• 51:23
  quality medical care, does that mean that insurers are that medical insurers and
• 51:29
  whatever else Medicaid and Medicare in this American Hodgepodge of a health care system that you
• 51:33
  have required to pay for gender affirming surgery? Yes, ultimately, yes. But initially, we just
• 51:41
  wanted to become accepted as a biological medical issue for which we could seek medical care,
• 51:50
  like anybody else, rather than, oh, your trans, I'm not going to treat your earache. And I know
• 51:55
  people who've gone through that. Yeah, it was pretty ugly 20 years ago in the South, for instance.
• 52:02
  But we got there and we got insurance companies to cover it. And then we got, you know,
• 52:06
  Medicare and Medicaid over the last five or six years to cover it. We, we got the rules changed.
• 52:13
  It used to be the only people who transitioned were those trans women who were willing to go
• 52:20
  the full nine yards. So that hormone therapy for a couple of years, and then had
• 52:26
  general reconstruction in order to live fully as women anatomically. That was the norm.
• 52:33
  There, I had a couple of friends who couldn't do the surgery because they were too overweight or
• 52:41
  they couldn't afford it at a time when there was no insurance and such. And so they wouldn't have
• 52:45
  general reconstruction. It was expensive even 20 years ago, 10, 20,000 dollars.
• 52:51
  And so we had a few. And then in the late 90s and early on, the trans men started coming out.
• 52:56
  They started believing the lesbian community, which really pissed off the lesbians because they
• 53:02
  were losing their partners, their butch partners. That's a whole other story that you can get into
• 53:08
  with somebody like Katie Herzog or something even though she's pretty young. I don't, I don't think,
• 53:14
  I don't think Katie could really speak to that personally. I'll have her on the show anyway.
• 53:19
  Yeah, you should definitely. I mean, I, yeah, then I, when I talk to Jesse, I, I mean, they always
• 53:25
  have a great rep, rep, rep, rep, rep, rep or rep or between the two of them. Anyway, so that's an
• 53:34
  issue. I mean, there may be like five lesbian bars left open in America today. So these,
• 53:40
  butch women started transitioning. And it gets very hard to do general reconstruction
• 53:48
  for a trans man. That one of the first things you learn in surgery 301 is it's a lot easier to dig a
• 53:54
  hole than build a pole. And that applies to this. It's easy to make a vagina, but it's very hard
• 54:00
  to build a penis. And we still haven't figured that out. So most trans men had to be able to get
• 54:05
  their legal rights without having penises that didn't work. So I remember after Obama, we were talking
• 54:12
  about the 2007, 2008 campaign, we went to secretary Clinton. And we asked her if she could change
• 54:18
  the rules for passports and allow people to change them without having surgery yet. Just having
• 54:23
  the intention to have surgery, if they were trans women, and if they were trans men,
• 54:28
  recognizing that it can't be done and just give it to them with their medical notes and stuff
• 54:32
  because of all the gatekeeping that we would go through. We had the good housekeeping seal of approval,
• 54:39
  all these decades. You had to go through the medical community. You needed psychologists,
• 54:44
  social workers, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, yet it's surgeons. You had to go through all that.
• 54:50
  With time, the next generation looked it and said, why do I have to go through all that? I know
• 54:56
  who I am. I don't need anybody telling me who I am. And that's true. I mean, I breeze through it
• 55:03
  because I said, look, I'm a physician and a surgeon. I know what I'm talking about. They go,
• 55:06
  okay, I'll defer to you. And I would teach these people rather than have them try to electrically
• 55:12
  about what I am. But I get it. But you have to realize sort of like Barney's engagement with
• 55:21
  his colleagues there that people need to be brought along. If you make the case that you deserve
• 55:28
  not to be discriminated against in employment or housing, you need people to believe that you
• 55:34
  pass muster with an organization or the physician. Somebody is saying you are who you are.
• 55:40
  We don't have that today with self-id. That's the problem in the adult trans community.
• 55:45
  This is what roiled the UK. This is why JK Rowling got tried for witchcraft and stuff.
• 55:52
  Dana, just to push back on that, we don't expect the same of guys and lesbians.
• 55:58
  Like if I say that I'm a radical treatment. No, but in terms of just say anti-discrimination law,
• 56:04
  if a person is discriminated against on the basis of their homosexuality,
• 56:08
  we don't say that there has to be some independent verification of their homosexuality.
• 56:11
  We just take their word for it. So why wouldn't we be the same with trans?
• 56:15
  Because it's a medical condition and you have to go through a process and such.
• 56:20
  But isn't that the point that's being contested, whether it is exclusively a medical condition?
• 56:25
  Yeah, well, that's right. So that would say, well, yeah, okay, for you, it's a medical condition.
• 56:30
  For us, it's an internal state of identity.
• 56:33
  Well, it's an internal state of identity for us, but it's based in a medical condition.
• 56:37
  And this is where all the chaos goes now. So when I was, when I started work in the American,
• 56:44
  when I was at a WPAT meeting in 1993 before I transitioned, but then after I transitioned,
• 56:50
  I would go to all of them. I know all the players. I've spoken to them even as recently as two
• 56:56
  years at the WPAT conference in Montreal and others via email and on phone. They all know what's
• 57:02
  going on. Back in the day, I told you what the numbers were. I brought them up, not to just
• 57:06
  seem like a math nerd, but because we were very few. And you know that as of 2018, with
• 57:12
  least the limits paper on ROGD, which is sort of a bizarre acronym, but okay, we'll go with it now.
• 57:19
  What's our own GD? We'll wrap it on sent gender dysphoria. This is all the adolescent females who
• 57:24
  suddenly claim to be trans in 2018 during the Me Too era. And it's like, who are these people?
• 57:33
  They're not presenting with the same history. It's nothing like anything they had seen,
• 57:38
  and it became clear to me then that these weren't transsexual people, that something else was
• 57:42
  going on. And that's going to be my main point here eventually. But say 20 years before, 15,
• 57:48
  20 years before that, the trans community, which had taken on transgender as its
• 57:56
  formal name instead of transsexual, because again, it didn't have sex in the word.
• 58:01
  Transgender was a term coined by a woman named Virginia Prince who was a permanent cross-dresser.
• 58:07
  She wasn't transsexual. She didn't say she was female. She just lived as a woman and wanted to
• 58:12
  live as a woman. And she needed a word for it. She called the transgender and we sort of embraced
• 58:17
  that. And eventually with time, just the way the homosexual community dropped everything,
• 58:22
  and just went with the three-letter, one syllable word gay, we went with the five-letter,
• 58:27
  one syllable word trans. And it worked when only transsexuals were applying for surgery and for
• 58:34
  legal name change and anti-discrimination protections and such like that. That ended,
• 58:41
  began to end. I first noticed it in 2013 and it's accelerated since then. There were,
• 58:47
  I gave you the numbers for like four or five times as many gay people as there are trans people,
• 58:53
  gay men as trans women and stuff like that. There were 40 times as many male cross-dresses
• 59:02
  20 years ago. And there are now. Male cross-dressing is a thing, okay? There are places the
• 59:09
  Bohemian Grove out in the Bay area where Republican cross-dresses would get together in parties for
• 59:15
  decades. It's like, it's a real thing. And you're saying this is more prevalent than homosexuality.
• 59:23
  Oh, much straight, straight male cross-dressing. Yeah, nobody's ever been able to do an accurate
• 59:29
  demographic study on this because until recently nobody would admit that they were a cross-dressing.
• 59:34
  Right. You know, the only person who would know that a guy who was a cross-dresser was usually his
• 59:38
  wife. And occasionally he would go out to a motel somewhere where a group of cross-dresses would
• 59:43
  get together or they come to conferences that we had dealing with the politics and the medicine
• 59:48
  and surgery of transsexualism and they would hang out because they could be on farm and hang out
• 59:54
  with actual transsexual women. And that was fine. Lovely people. But they didn't express their
• 1:00:02
  fetish or kink or whatever out in public. Now that happens all the time and then they
• 1:00:07
  say, I say, I'm a woman, you have to respect that. Why do you call it a fetish or a kink? That
• 1:00:15
  sounds reminiscent of the critique that you and I know. I know it does. You were saying that gay
• 1:00:21
  people would always be peppered with questions about their sex lives. Yeah, about their sex lives.
• 1:00:26
  Not as a kinky thing. It's like, what do you, what do you guys do and everything? Because people,
• 1:00:30
  it was different. Most people didn't know anything about it. You're saying that the, you know,
• 1:00:37
  people who I know who present as non-binary and who are guys with beards who go out and wear
• 1:00:43
  dresses. That that's a fetish that they're exhibiting in public because they seem to think it's a
• 1:00:49
  yeah, you want me? You want my honest opinion? Yeah, I think it's an infantile delusion. I think
• 1:00:55
  it's nonsense. It's an ideological. It's part of queer theory, which is what I'm coming to at the
• 1:01:00
  end. People didn't do that before queer theory started spilling out of the academy. We had all sorts
• 1:01:06
  of gender nonconforming people in the 70s, 80s and 90s, but there were gay women who were gender
• 1:01:12
  nonconforming, but stone butch. I mean, you could, you had a whole zoo affiliate of all these
• 1:01:17
  then that they gay men, bears and leather and this and that. Yeah, I think you'd call guys who
• 1:01:23
  march down Market Street or mission in San Francisco during a leather week or something. That's a
• 1:01:29
  fetish or something. What is that? That's so much of kink. Whatever. I don't care. But
• 1:01:35
  and in San Francisco, it's perfectly reasonable, but recently the pride parades,
• 1:01:39
  they're naked men running around. There are all these, you know, bearded guys and stuff and
• 1:01:44
  flaunting their penises. It's almost as if so you know, you've had drag queens in the gay community
• 1:01:51
  forever, right? And drag queens are male, right? They would never deny that they are male or
• 1:02:02
  men. They would never get rid of their penises. But some of them live much of their lives as women.
• 1:02:09
  And some of them now who I know have affluiting with like they've him pronouns, for example.
• 1:02:16
  Yeah, because that's the cool thing that the kids do. They'll dye their hair purple and then
• 1:02:19
  they'll do they them. And the next thing, you know, they're queer, so Palestine. So, you know,
• 1:02:22
  this is all awareness. Well, some of them actually, I know, I know some drag queens who have gone
• 1:02:28
  from absolute, you know, cis male, he, him, but I do drag as a performative fun thing. Yeah,
• 1:02:36
  then they've gone into the old days, they've gone into the them. And now they've come back from
• 1:02:41
  they them to go, you know what? I actually am a man. I like being a man. I'm going back to he,
• 1:02:45
  him, but I'm still doing drag. Yeah. No, a lot of the drag was performative. Maybe it wasn't the
• 1:02:51
  British army known for this, like for 200 years, the British Navy and stuff. I mean, it's not that gay
• 1:02:56
  men have not done drag or even straight men haven't done drag when they get lonely and stuff,
• 1:03:00
  you know, prisons and old proof, you know, the homosexuality that that's forced upon you and
• 1:03:06
  male prisons and women. Yes, situational homosexuality. Yeah, that's like, look, I'm you can,
• 1:03:13
  you can be a cross-stressor, you can do all that. The problem is when all of a sudden you go,
• 1:03:17
  well, I don't need to go through a medical process to prove I'm transsexual, the old term.
• 1:03:22
  I can just ID that way and you have to accept me. And when I go into a spa and I
• 1:03:27
  used to have my balls waxed by the young Korean woman who doesn't want to do it, I can then get $50,000
• 1:03:34
  from her for violating my rights. And that actually happened. Just explain that. There was a female
• 1:03:39
  only Korean spa. Yeah, I think this was in Vancouver. If I remember the latest with Victoria,
• 1:03:46
  maybe your Vancouver, where there was, there's this TRA, as you call them, trans right activists,
• 1:03:52
  a real in your face one who would deliberately go into these places to annoy, you know, not to
• 1:03:59
  make a point that, hey, I'm a woman just like you don't, I look like a woman. And most of these people
• 1:04:04
  don't look like women. And they scare the hell out of women who are half their size, right? And
• 1:04:08
  that's why the sports thing is an issue because if you bring a trans man, a trans woman into rugby,
• 1:04:16
  into the women's rugby team, you could hurt somebody. I mean, in Bobby got his nose broken,
• 1:04:22
  he had to come out of the game today when he got hit in the face again. I mean, this is,
• 1:04:26
  this is just men playing. But if you bring a guy like him into the women's soccer and he's
• 1:04:31
  banging into people in the mouth, it's just, it's not fair. We got gay rights because we ask for
• 1:04:37
  fairness. Treat us the way you treat your straight brothers and sisters. They can get married.
• 1:04:44
  We want to be able to get married if we want to. They can serve in the military. We want to be
• 1:04:48
  able to do that. You know, they have their sex lives and nobody's peering into their bedroom.
• 1:04:53
  We want you to leave us alone. We did the same thing in the trans community. We explained the
• 1:04:58
  medical condition. People understood that. I said, you know, so, you know, Joe, you're, you're
• 1:05:04
  diabetic. You go to your doctor and everything. This is no different. Night. It's a form of
• 1:05:08
  intersex. I don't know. Just to close interject here. The analogy that, sorry, the example that
• 1:05:13
  you gave that anecdote about saying, look, you used to think that gays were weird. Well, I think
• 1:05:20
  trans people are weird. But like, it's almost like there's this constant progressing vanguard of,
• 1:05:29
  of more expensive inclusion and, and a greater sensitivity towards new groups. Why does that not
• 1:05:37
  apply now to people who do not have a medicalized interpretation of gender and sex, but who feel
• 1:05:45
  like their gender fluid that like playing with gender is a true expression of their own authenticity.
• 1:05:53
  Why are you drawing a line in the sand and saying, okay, the version of trans that I have, which is
• 1:05:58
  this sort of biological intersex transexualism is the one that needs equality. But the next step
• 1:06:05
  beyond that is an illegitimate chess move. Right. It depends what you mean by equality. I mean,
• 1:06:11
  I'm not saying these people can't live their lives. I'm just saying they can't then demand
• 1:06:17
  of the government. And that means of all of us that they be allowed into women's spaces. If the
• 1:06:24
  women don't want them, if the women want them, who cares, right? In, in the US, you know, in the
• 1:06:32
  Declaration of Independence, such as relevance, since it was written just a few days ago, 248 years
• 1:06:37
  on a few days ago, the main values of this country are liberty and equality. Those two are always
• 1:06:47
  in conflict. What I consider my freedom to do and such like that will often impinge upon somebody
• 1:06:53
  else. Or as the classic, I forget to the justice was I said it, you're right to be yourself
• 1:07:01
  ends at the tip of my nose, right? You can't punch me. You're not allowed to do that. So there are
• 1:07:07
  limits on liberty and there are limits on equality. And when I was working in Maryland in Montgomery
• 1:07:15
  County where I live here and such, I would work with people. And we would talk about how I had some,
• 1:07:23
  there were some lesbians who were working in a rape crisis center. And they said, you know, Dana,
• 1:07:28
  we just, we can't have somebody who has a deep voice, you know, work in a rape crisis hotline.
• 1:07:33
  It's going to freak these women out. They've just been raped by guys. And I go, okay, you
• 1:07:38
  had a point. We can make an exception for that. You know, our freedom here, the anti-discrimination
• 1:07:44
  doesn't have to be total with this just the way it's fair if women decide they don't want
• 1:07:53
  somebody who identifies as a woman to walk around a locker room with their penis dangling around.
• 1:08:00
  This was the case with Lea Thomas that my alma mater penned. Things like that, these aren't,
• 1:08:07
  you know, this is not the way people spend most of their lives, right? It's not like
• 1:08:13
  you need to do this. I could understand that. They go, yeah, we want you to have your freedom.
• 1:08:18
  And we accept you for who you are. I went through this. I had to change. And it wasn't necessarily easy.
• 1:08:25
  What easier than I thought it would be, but not necessarily easy. But I succeeded because I was
• 1:08:31
  open to listening to people. I was open to listening to, well, we have an issue with this. We have
• 1:08:35
  an issue with that. You know, I even work to try to get transexual. Again, we were calling
• 1:08:43
  that time transexual women into women's prisons in Maryland. And back in the day, that was fine.
• 1:08:50
  I don't know a single transexual woman who was acted out like a guy with male privilege or whatever
• 1:08:57
  you want to call it. So it was like no, we had to fight when we first passed the law here in 2007
• 1:09:05
  in Montgomery County. We had to fight the idea that men would dress up as women and go into women's
• 1:09:12
  spaces and rape them. It never happened. I got my, but I hear, Dana, I hear people now saying that
• 1:09:20
  this isn't happening either. That it's a boogie. I know, but that's not, you know, they say you
• 1:09:25
  can cherry pick two or three cases that have happened, but there are thousands and thousands and
• 1:09:30
  thousands and thousands of trans women in women's prisons. And it is a rare occurrence that any of
• 1:09:37
  them act up. There isn't a stronger argument, though, one of principle rather than one of
• 1:09:43
  sort of anecdotes, like even if there were no, it strikes me that the conservative position
• 1:09:49
  would be that even if, even if there were never any assaults on cis women in women's prisons,
• 1:09:57
  the principle should be that people who were biologically male should not be in women's spaces
• 1:10:05
  where they're vulnerable or those women are vulnerable, even if it were the case that they were
• 1:10:10
  never acting up. And I don't know how you reconcile that principle with the principles that you've
• 1:10:17
  been such an effective activist for, which is, but I think that's simple. No, no, it's not. I mean,
• 1:10:24
  all of these issues, I mean, every time I was called into a business, you know, to talk to them
• 1:10:28
  because they have a trans employee or something, and how do you use the bathroom and how do you work
• 1:10:33
  that out? If you sit and talk to people, you work it out almost every single time. I never came
• 1:10:39
  across anybody like that trans woman, quote, trans identified woman who goes into spouse just to
• 1:10:46
  cause trouble. That's a different type of person. That person is seriously mentally ill. She's
• 1:10:52
  trying to make trouble. Well, I don't want to make a point, right? I mean, it's like, you know,
• 1:10:57
  you heard my interview with the founder of Giggle, the, yeah, taken to court by a trans woman.
• 1:11:06
  And, you know, some people say, well, that was a frivolous case, but some people say, you know,
• 1:11:12
  it's an important test case to know whether or not women's spaces, women's only spaces are
• 1:11:19
  allowed to discriminate against trans women. Like, we always need test cases, right?
• 1:11:24
  And we always do, and usually law is made on the worst cases as well. You know, Lawrence,
• 1:11:28
  V. Texas was not everybody's ideal case. Um, you know, overturn exotomy 21 years ago. So you
• 1:11:35
  get stuck with stuff like that. But I'm talking about trying to convince the average person with whom I
• 1:11:41
  live and work in my neighborhood and in the area that the people like us are not a threat. And people
• 1:11:48
  like us were not a threat until queerness came into society. And now you have, and there are
• 1:11:55
  enough examples that it's not just anecdotal. There are enough examples of men who rape and kill,
• 1:12:03
  get convicted, and then announced that they're women, right? There are enough of those. You can
• 1:12:07
  Google them. You probably find dozens of them at this point, particularly in the UK. I don't know
• 1:12:11
  why Scotland is a particularly hotbed of this, but that's a problem. They take advantage because
• 1:12:17
  they had very protective self-idee, like very generous self-idee. Very generous self-idee. Yeah, I say
• 1:12:24
  I'm the opposite sex and therefore I am. Right. And so why would you? So I would ask you. So if
• 1:12:30
  that's the case, why would you have a problem with that? If a rapist and a murderer, you know,
• 1:12:35
  wants to self-identify a woman, shouldn't he be able to be in the women's prison? But if you ask
• 1:12:40
  the women there, they don't want a guy with a penis walking around because he's already used it
• 1:12:45
  to harm other women. So this is the way I look. Let's be fair. So I was not to be
• 1:12:51
  histrionic. I think you would easily get a compromise in any jurisdiction that would say
• 1:13:00
  if you have been convicted of a sex offense, then you don't get to transition post-hoc.
• 1:13:07
  And why isn't it like you can, but you're not going to go into that. You're going to, if you've
• 1:13:11
  ever been a sexual offender, then you're going to go into the prison that is gendered to your
• 1:13:15
  life. But it hasn't happened. It hasn't happened. The trans rights activists in the UK just,
• 1:13:19
  you know, go crazy when you even suggest something like that. That's the kind of compromise I'm willing
• 1:13:25
  to do. Right. If somebody wants to be, I saw a couple of weeks ago, I went to my farmer's market
• 1:13:30
  on Sunday and there was a cross-dresser walking around. That's not the thing I had ever seen before.
• 1:13:35
  No, none of the cross-dresses I knew in my day would ever go out like that because the guy
• 1:13:40
  not to a farmer's market. I mean, not to a farmer's market. I was kind of money for a zucchini.
• 1:13:44
  Right. Of all those things, right. This was a man in the dress. People were saying,
• 1:13:48
  you see, there's a man in the dress. Oh, you know, I don't know why they feel the need to do it.
• 1:13:53
  I think they just sort of feel liberated in a way because they've been in the closet,
• 1:13:57
  they've been in the house, they've been in the motel or whatever, the conference. And now they
• 1:14:01
  can finally just go out and do it. But do we really need to normalize that? I'm not saying make it
• 1:14:08
  illegal. I'm just saying, do we really need to normalize that? We're talking about the potential
• 1:14:13
  downsides of normalizing it because I have the sense that your experience over the past decade
• 1:14:17
  has been frustrating to you in seeing the way that the transgender movement has gone and that you
• 1:14:24
  have a sense that it's actually made the fight harder rather than easier. Right. That's true. So
• 1:14:30
  this is I want to get back to the the terminology. Yeah. This is this is queer stuff.
• 1:14:35
  Queering means to overturn the status quo. If it's cis hetero normative or as it is now cis hetero
• 1:14:42
  slash homo normative because you're a target too, then there's something evil about that because
• 1:14:48
  you're the oppressor, you're the victimizer and that needs to be overturned. So that's what this
• 1:14:52
  is a part of. That's why I tell people don't support anybody who says they're queer. I'm not
• 1:14:57
  talking about some 80 year old who goes, yeah, I used to be beaten over the head, people yelling,
• 1:15:02
  queer, fag and stuff like that. I want to embrace it now. I'm talking about the way the movement
• 1:15:06
  uses queer today. That is part of a postmodernist deconstructionist mangling of language that has
• 1:15:16
  changed so that trans little longer means transsexual. Gender dysphoria now means gender nonconformity.
• 1:15:23
  Gender identity simply means you're feeling at any given time and it can change from day to day,
• 1:15:30
  right? Gender fluid and everything. I remember sitting at the the Senate hearings down in an
• 1:15:35
  apolis in the Maryland State House and explaining to people, no, we don't wake up one morning and think
• 1:15:41
  we're a man and then the next morning and think we're a woman. Now that's normal. That's not
• 1:15:45
  transsexuals and I don't think people like that should be given legal recognition to be able to do
• 1:15:51
  that. If you want to do that in your life, you know, I know most of my gay male friends call each
• 1:15:56
  other cis or she, right? I don't, I don't care about that. And people who use they then pronouns,
• 1:16:04
  I just ignore them. I don't, I refuse to do it. That's my right though. This is what I mean.
• 1:16:09
  You can live your life with the minute you cross over and demand that I accept you, that I
• 1:16:14
  recognize you. That's a step too far. We never did that. Gay people never did that and trans people
• 1:16:19
  never did that. We made ourselves known. We explained and then we succeeded, including a rather
• 1:16:25
  conservative court back in 2020. So what trans means today, and this is, I mentioned the ROGD
• 1:16:32
  list, Lisa Litman episode, is that all these adolescent girls decided all rapid on set.
• 1:16:39
  That gender dysphoria, which was really, I mean, that's, that's not an appropriate term,
• 1:16:44
  but it's what's become accepted. So I'll accept it. And male cross dressing is now known these days
• 1:16:51
  as auto-guinephilia or AGP. You may have heard that. Yeah, but I thought that was pejorative and
• 1:16:57
  they don't like it because it implies that it's, that it's a sexual fetish, whereas some people
• 1:17:03
  cross-dressed just feel like it's a non-sexualized gender play. Yeah, they're very blanchored
• 1:17:10
  coin that in the 90s and I had plenty of arguments with him. And I think it's simply a literary term
• 1:17:17
  for cross-dressing fantasies and such and cross-dressing. Again, we're talking about 10%
• 1:17:22
  of the male population. There's a wide spectrum. Some people just do it because it makes them feel
• 1:17:28
  comfortable. Others get their kicks and certainly when you're younger, they get more of a kick-out
• 1:17:33
  sexually. It's very complicated. You get more of a kick-out of everything when you're younger.
• 1:17:37
  That's just how biology would. That's right. Right. I mean, now, sex now in my 70s, I don't, yeah.
• 1:17:45
  I should have been chosen as the grand marshal of the fri parade as the asexual. They had one in
• 1:17:51
  London. I'm proudly asexual. I'm all of them. Crippet. I don't care anymore. So that, that's an
• 1:17:57
  identity. I mean, are you crazy? That's why you're philosophical. But wait, surely there are some
• 1:18:04
  people. Isn't it true that there are some people who have just never, who don't have the erotic
• 1:18:09
  like switch? They've never been turned on by anything. That's right. But why is that a protected
• 1:18:16
  category? Who the hell cares? Just don't have sex. They're the funniest ones. No, but if they got
• 1:18:22
  fired because they revealed that about themselves in an intimate moment in the staff kitchen with one
• 1:18:27
  of their confidants, then you would want them to be protected. That's so stupid. That's, you know,
• 1:18:33
  so here's here's the funniest one. Somebody try to be one. I don't. Somebody, somebody coin the term
• 1:18:40
  demisexual. You know what that is? Remind me. That somebody is interested in only one partner at a
• 1:18:47
  time. And so everybody jokes about that. You mean like 95% of the certainly of women. Yeah. And
• 1:18:55
  probably 80% of men. I mean, what do you want of non-human mammals as well? That's right. That's
• 1:19:01
  right. That's right. Because we found gay tanguins and stuff. I actually saw some in Antarctica when
• 1:19:06
  I was there like five years ago. So whatever. But it's like, you know, some of the stupidity, I,
• 1:19:13
  people asked me how I identified after I came out, you know, or my romantic relationship. I
• 1:19:17
  said, I'm a sapio sexual. I like smart people. I like people who are creative or curious. So
• 1:19:26
  we would make fun of it. But now to put it on the, you know, the alphabet soup and everything
• 1:19:30
  and to try to give protections for it, it just shows you how insane it's got because these are
• 1:19:35
  people who've made their identity, their primary aspect of their character in life. And I find
• 1:19:42
  that so very sad. I don't know anybody who did that when I was younger. We all had dreams,
• 1:19:49
  you know, professional dreams, get a job, have a family, be a doctor, be a lawyer, be a teacher,
• 1:19:55
  whatever. I was raised that way. Everybody I knew, even all the trans people I knew, they didn't
• 1:20:00
  want to just be, I am trans and everything's going to revolve around trans. I find that very sad
• 1:20:06
  and empty in general. But here, to put all this stuff, they sound silly to you. I was like,
• 1:20:12
  just live and let me live. What's people libertarian about this? And generally, I'm a social
• 1:20:16
  libertarian, but I'm also a scientist. And you know about the cast report and all the issues
• 1:20:21
  about youth gender medicine and stuff. So as I said, just give us a brief summary.
• 1:20:27
  Well, since the late 90s, when we recognize that puberty blockers worked well,
• 1:20:34
  I think they even used them first in Australia too, if I remember correctly back in the 80s and 90s,
• 1:20:42
  in order to delight puberty when girls were developing breasts and starting their periods,
• 1:20:47
  and when they were eight or nine, maybe we can use this for kids who come in and say they're trans
• 1:20:53
  in the old transsexual sense and just give them a couple of years to make sure they know what
• 1:20:59
  they're talking about. And then when they've had a chance to evolve a little bit more and mature
• 1:21:04
  a little bit more, then we could start hormones and go with them. The Dutch did the first study,
• 1:21:08
  very small study, only 53 people, I believe. And it looked like it was useful stuff. It made
• 1:21:17
  its way across here to Boston Children's, Norma Speck, a friend who started using them in 2007,
• 1:21:23
  2008. And but at the time, they had like three or four kids on the clinic in a year,
• 1:21:31
  you know, talking to a place like Boston, which is a medical mech, a mass general, you know,
• 1:21:35
  Boston Children's, Beth Israel, you only came there if you really needed help.
• 1:21:43
  And then in the teens, suddenly it exploded. Everybody wanted to be trans, sort of like the
• 1:21:50
  the tiktok ticks that happened in 2020, the tiktok roll where kids were suddenly, you know,
• 1:21:56
  cursing in their heads were spinning around like this. And sort of like, you know, that's what
• 1:22:01
  probably what Joe's doing on a much more teacher level today. I don't think he's following a tiktok
• 1:22:07
  that closely. Now maybe not who knows? Maybe he's, you know, when they think he's napping,
• 1:22:13
  he's under the blanket, he's watching. But this is, it's a very, it's a popular subgenre.
• 1:22:21
  Well, you know, and I think so now that you mentioned that, I've thought about this and I do think
• 1:22:25
  that maybe he does have Parkinson's, but you know, Parkinson's people have ticks of a sort,
• 1:22:31
  but not like the ticks that you can curse whenever the hell you feel like it, which is why teenagers
• 1:22:36
  would like it, right? So this one, they all had that disease. They're in the pandemic. And then
• 1:22:40
  people would say, no, that's all a social contagion. That can't be real. And, you know, girls do
• 1:22:44
  this. Girls have a stereotype. It would used to be called a stereotype that sex is to say that,
• 1:22:48
  but they would go into, you know, groups of girls in schools and in convents, all of a sudden would
• 1:22:52
  go psychotic and delusional. But that can't be true for trans people because trans is a real thing.
• 1:22:59
  You know, but when you and I have been talking about why can't some guy who gets his kicks that are
• 1:23:03
  putting on his wife's stress, you know, go out to the farmer's market and buy some zikinis?
• 1:23:08
  Who's he hurting? He's not hurting anybody. Well, if it's just a social construct, right,
• 1:23:14
  that's the phrase, then why in the world do you medicalize it? If anybody depend regardless of
• 1:23:20
  their genitalia, why do you have to take kids and put them on puberty blockers and then do double
• 1:23:26
  mastectomies and ultimately, you know, vaginal plastic? It's totally illogical. But as I've told
• 1:23:34
  you before, transsexual kids exist. I was a transsexual kid. It was the earliest memory I ever had.
• 1:23:39
  We do exist, but we're very few and far between. But the numbers exploded. Come like 2007, 2008,
• 1:23:45
  we went from two or three gender clinics in America to over a hundred. So something else was
• 1:23:51
  happening here. And I can tell you as a scientist that I mentioned the cast report, I'll get to that
• 1:23:57
  in a minute. When you're doing science, when you're doing research, you have to be able to
• 1:24:01
  define your terms. And I have said now for the past hour that the language involved with trans
• 1:24:08
  has evolved with time and is now completely different at odds with what it was 20 years ago.
• 1:24:17
  You're doing a paper. You're saying, well, we examine 30 people who identified as transgender.
• 1:24:23
  Then the next paper says we identify 40 people who identified as trans non-binary. And then we
• 1:24:29
  identified in another university center, 50 people who identified as transgender, not conforming.
• 1:24:37
  Nobody knows what they're talking about. There's an old phrase that goes back to the early years of
• 1:24:42
  software development. GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. You can't do science with that. You can't say
• 1:24:49
  this paper, which talks about trans non-binary and non-binary is not a biological thing. So it's
• 1:24:53
  a completely different matter. And why are you medicalizing a non-binary person? Right. So it's
• 1:24:58
  essentially, it's like it's an opinion poll. It's almost like, at the risk of drawing a long
• 1:25:05
  bow, I'm sort of like when people talk about the opinion polls about Joe Biden's performance at
• 1:25:10
  the debate, I'm like, actually, who cares about opinion polls? Everyone saw what is patently true,
• 1:25:15
  which is that he can't follow a train of thought for more than 10 seconds. That is disqualifying,
• 1:25:21
  regardless of whether people see that or not. There is no way that you can have
• 1:25:27
  faith that when the red phone in the Oval Office rings, because Putin has done something with
• 1:25:35
  Belarus that he's going to be in a condition to make the right call about that, because he
• 1:25:40
  wasn't even in a condition to be able to be in control of his cognitive capacities at the most
• 1:25:46
  important moment, which is a presidential debate. So I sort of think who needs the opinion poll?
• 1:25:53
  And in a strange parallel way, if you're doing studies about gender identity and the only criteria
• 1:26:01
  for entry into the study is that you're essentially doing an opinion poll about how the person,
• 1:26:06
  what words the person uses to describe their identity group, rather than any characteristic of
• 1:26:12
  that person, then you're not even necessarily studying the thing that you claim to be studying.
• 1:26:17
  You're really just claiming how young people talk to themselves.
• 1:26:21
  And they learn from one another and they they're on TikTok and they're on, you know,
• 1:26:26
  they were on Tumblr. All of this queer stuff began in 2012 on Tumblr.
• 1:26:31
  And you can't do science this way. You just, you have to define your terms. You can't say,
• 1:26:36
  well, I shot this proton at that receiver over there, and I'm going to shoot an electron,
• 1:26:42
  but I'm going to call it a proton. Yeah, I mean, this isn't how you advance. You cannot do that.
• 1:26:48
  Yet nobody acknowledges that. Now, the most important thing, and this will get into the
• 1:26:52
  cast report and such. This research, as I said, is garbage. It's just, it's garbage from the get go.
• 1:27:00
  Even if the rest of the methodology is accurate and appropriate, it's garbage because you
• 1:27:04
  haven't defined your population. So you're trying to do these evidence-based studies on junk,
• 1:27:15
  the WPATH, which you know, World Professional Association of Transgender Health,
• 1:27:20
  you've talked about it here before, they're a sake, the standards of care version eight,
• 1:27:24
  which came out in the fall of 2022. That now it appears that Admiral Rachel Levine, a trans woman
• 1:27:30
  who's the assistant secretary of HHS Health and Human Services, and such was sort of sticking
• 1:27:39
  her thumb on the scale for that too, which explains why Rachel refuses to talk to me,
• 1:27:44
  and has refused to talk to me since that conference in 2022. But so I know a bunch of people,
• 1:27:51
  and I know a bunch of people in the business who know what they're doing is wrong. They're very
• 1:27:55
  uncomfortable with it, but they can't bring themselves to stop. There is a couple of paragraphs
• 1:28:01
  in the adolescent section, which is really what youth gender medicine is about. There aren't
• 1:28:06
  that many children per se. It's youth gender medicine of adolescents. And it says that we recognize
• 1:28:13
  that as of 2017, 2018, we had this explosion, particularly of young girls who approached us and did
• 1:28:20
  this and that. We know this is not what it was before. This is not normal, and we need to
• 1:28:27
  evaluate this. And then they just dropped it. They just went on as if that didn't exist.
• 1:28:33
  And this is basically what I'm doing. I'm trying to point out that these people look trans
• 1:28:36
  identified, but there's nothing trans about them. And this is why we just closed the loop on
• 1:28:43
  puberty blockers and the cast report. Yes. So if you are accepting that just some child today
• 1:28:51
  who's exposed to TikTok, who's in school, where teachers are saying, most of you might think
• 1:28:58
  your boys or girls, but according to HRC, you can be both or neither as well. And kids are exposed
• 1:29:04
  to this. So then they become anxious or depressed. It's all those comorbidities that Hillary
• 1:29:09
  can't have talked about. And then we had diagnostic overshadowing. So if they come into a clinic
• 1:29:15
  with anxiety or depression or cutting or anything like that, then the clinician in the gender
• 1:29:20
  clinic would ask, well, do you have any gender issues? And the kid goes, well, I haven't thought about
• 1:29:24
  it, but maybe then suddenly we'll fix the gender stuff. And then we'll get back to the other.
• 1:29:29
  When I was going through my transition, I did the exact opposite. I fixed the anxiety
• 1:29:33
  into depression and the PTSD from my trauma when I was a kid before I even had the strength
• 1:29:39
  to transition because it's not easy. It takes a lot of time. I mean, I also don't want to
• 1:29:43
  caricature gender clinics. I'm sure that it's also often the case that these things are going
• 1:29:48
  hand in hand, right? And that, I mean, I've spoken to psycho. No, not in gender clinics. Now,
• 1:29:54
  if you are seeing your pediatrician or your adolescent, the medicine, the family practitioner,
• 1:30:02
  they may then send you to a psychiatrist or whatever. Only if they think that maybe there's
• 1:30:07
  something to do with gender here. And again, gender is a social construct. I don't know why you'd
• 1:30:11
  want to medicalize it, but okay, they then send you to a gender clinic. And the gender clinics
• 1:30:16
  are almost invariably focused on accepting. You're going to trust kids, right? Believe women,
• 1:30:24
  unless they're Israeli women who are raped, but we'll believe women. And then we will,
• 1:30:28
  well, this I've got most of the body for rest. Let's open up another two and a half hour
• 1:30:32
  conversation. That's right. But it's all part. It's all the same thing. It's like, oh,
• 1:30:38
  you don't trust them because they're Jewish, but you trust all the others. You're going to trust
• 1:30:42
  this six-year-old kid who says that he's really a girl or non-binary or something. What's wrong
• 1:30:48
  with you? The odds that that kid is truly transsexual or exceedingly slim. I gave you the numbers
• 1:30:53
  before. Don't accept that. Most of these kids will outgrow this. They will desist as the phrase used
• 1:30:59
  to be. Now, to give you a little bit more background on this back in the 90s, you've heard a Ken
• 1:31:05
  Zucker, the Canadian Psychologist? No. Ken Zucker is probably the most prolific gender clinician
• 1:31:15
  in North America, at least probably in the world, and Ken would see boys, fem boys, his parents
• 1:31:22
  brought them to him because parents didn't care about, you know, tomboy, so they never brought
• 1:31:27
  the girls. So these were always boys who were acting out femininely. And it turned out that
• 1:31:35
  80% of them would go on to being gay. This is why people say that transitioning kids is
• 1:31:44
  profoundly homophobic because the kids who are going to be presenting this way, we're going to
• 1:31:49
  feel comfortable saying I'm a girl, are probably gay. You mean it's just a numbers game because
• 1:31:55
  there are so many more gay men than transsexuals? Well, yeah, yeah, it is. Most of the kids in his
• 1:32:00
  clinic, 80% of them turned out to be gay. 15% of them turned out to be straight. They got over it.
• 1:32:06
  They desisted. And 5% of them were transsexual. Ken never really accepted that transsexual people
• 1:32:14
  existed, which was a problem. But as the research was done, he became much more open to it. And by
• 1:32:21
  the last time I saw him about, I don't know, five, six years ago, he accepted the transsexual people
• 1:32:26
  accessed. But not this, you know, flood of people claiming to be trans. That was true then. And we
• 1:32:35
  argued about it against him because he wasn't, he didn't care about the transsexual girls in that,
• 1:32:42
  the transsexual girls behave very differently than the gay boys. For the most part, again, like you
• 1:32:47
  said, every person is different. You can't be precise. And there's no medical tests. There's no
• 1:32:52
  blood tests. And there's no scan yet. That's available. As time has gone by now, most of these
• 1:33:02
  people are not transsexual. Most of them don't even pretend to be trans in any way. They just
• 1:33:09
  call themselves like this American woman who's on the Olympic team. I think she's running the
• 1:33:14
  5,000 meters or something. I forget her name. She's proudly trans non-binary.
• 1:33:19
  I mean, seriously, what does that mean? You go by date by... Is she a biological female?
• 1:33:24
  Yes, she's a biological female. So she was accepted on the women's team. There was no problem
• 1:33:28
  with it. And she's, she's a woman. And she's running with women. And just because she calls
• 1:33:32
  herself a them doesn't put her in a separate scientific medical category. It's just absurd. And to
• 1:33:39
  me, as a transsexual who was a transsexual kid and worked hard to get those kids to be recognized
• 1:33:47
  and to get care for everybody of all ages, to see this flood of people pretending to be trans or
• 1:33:52
  just saying, I feel like, you know, I haven't a beard and putting on a dress. It just makes a
• 1:33:58
  farce out of all the... And I hear this from parents and such. There are too many parents who take
• 1:34:04
  it seriously if their kid comes home from school and says, I've changed my pronouns or I've changed
• 1:34:09
  my name. And a lot of schools are not allowed to tell parents. And I know parents who've seen that.
• 1:34:14
  During the pandemic, I saw people would come to me again because I was the lead trans activist
• 1:34:20
  in Maryland and say, you know, our 16 year old daughter just came to us and said, she wants to have
• 1:34:24
  a mastectomy. What do I do? And I'd sit him down and say, well, does she have any friends
• 1:34:33
  that feel the same way? Oh, yeah, about a third of her home room is trans non-binary.
• 1:34:38
  I go, just keep her locked down in the house with everybody else that she'll get over it.
• 1:34:42
  You know, and a lot of them just got over it once the pandemic ended and they were able to get out
• 1:34:47
  and have lost. I mean, is it in addition to potentially being caused by some kind of, you know,
• 1:34:53
  social contagion at the risk of using that term? Is there also a factor of people trying to
• 1:34:59
  do the right thing by being allies? Like, especially not in adolescence so much, but I'm thinking about
• 1:35:04
  this Olympic runner. Like, you know, it's almost, imagine if you'd made an analogy to race and people
• 1:35:11
  who are Southern European and slightly darker skinned, like, you know, a tan and all of skin,
• 1:35:21
  an all of skinned Greek says, or your typical Israeli, right? Yeah, exactly.
• 1:35:27
  Lonialist is real. Let's, let's say that they are that that that person wants to
• 1:35:36
  feel like they're, they have solidarity with people of color and therefore they say that they're
• 1:35:43
  race non-binary or they're race, you know, they're in other words, that would be regarded as being
• 1:35:50
  by people of color, I think probably legitimately as a co-option of their trauma. Like, you know,
• 1:35:57
  if you're a black American and you code as a black American, then it would probably be a little bit
• 1:36:03
  of a slap in the face if like, you know, someone from Naples starts saying that they're a person
• 1:36:10
  of color because they're from Southern Italy and they tan well. It happened. Yeah, but we don't,
• 1:36:18
  we don't hold people who claim to be a member of the trans community to the same.
• 1:36:25
  I know, isn't that interesting? Right. So we're talking, you're talking about race essentialism,
• 1:36:30
  basically, the Rachel Dolas also, the world. She's trans-racial. She got away with it for a
• 1:36:35
  long time. There are other women like her. Jewish woman as it turns out, I don't know why,
• 1:36:41
  but you know, and there are people, Asian kids when they're applying to college,
• 1:36:45
  are often told to pretend to be somebody they're not. So they don't get just put in the trash
• 1:36:50
  as being Asian. They're taught how to write, you know, write black. This is because Asians are so
• 1:36:59
  academically successful that they know that if they come across as an Asian as an individual,
• 1:37:05
  the odds will be stacked against them because in terms of quotas and the proportion of
• 1:37:10
  the student class that should be from particular demographics, it's not a good thing to be an Asian,
• 1:37:16
  because my specialized high school on the Bronx used to be back in the 60s was 50% Jewish.
• 1:37:23
  And today it's like 80% Asian. So I have a high school down downtown Manhattan, it's the same kind
• 1:37:29
  of thing. And well, if you're what you do, you want there? No, but I know, well, because I,
• 1:37:34
  I mean, I lived in New York and I lived on the Lower East Side and so on. So do you know science
• 1:37:39
  also? But I went to science because it was co-ed because I was a girl and I wanted to be amongst
• 1:37:46
  other girls. That was my voyeuristic experience of, you know, being in a teenage girl,
• 1:37:51
  as I couldn't tell anybody about it. I remember one of my best friends from high school when I came
• 1:37:56
  out there 20 years ago, she said, we were such good friends. Why didn't you tell me? And I go
• 1:38:03
  in 1966? What would you have said? You wouldn't have accepted me if you thought I was gay,
• 1:38:09
  but trans? Really? That had no traction then. It wouldn't have been crazy. I would have had no
• 1:38:14
  friends whatsoever. So I kept my mouth shut. Don't hold it against me. I pretended, I wore a mask,
• 1:38:19
  I survived. Here I am now. I've done some good in the world. I'm happy with that. It worked out.
• 1:38:24
  But yeah, you know, you're absolutely right. So that's race essentialism, which is what
• 1:38:28
  even Kendi and Roman DiAngelo, that's what all of Woteness is. Critical race theory is that,
• 1:38:33
  oh, there is something inherently essential about being black. Not about being white. White is
• 1:38:39
  the negation of black, right? But it's that's what we talked about before. Why do white
• 1:38:44
  majority countries have to become diverse and black majority countries don't? Because there's
• 1:38:48
  something inherently essential about being black. So it's not fair to culturally appropriate
• 1:38:54
  blackness, even to show allyship per se. It's the other way around when it comes to LGBT.
• 1:39:03
  How many people, I mean, Andrew Sullivan would talk about this a lot because you know,
• 1:39:07
  you can't go into a gay bar in DC anymore and not have it overrun with young white women,
• 1:39:14
  who identify as queer. They like the space. It was a safe space for them, right?
• 1:39:19
  Gay men weren't going to assault them. This is the reality of life that people with penises
• 1:39:24
  assault people with the genus. And then with time, it's just sort of all the queer. Have you noticed
• 1:39:30
  how most non-binary women are gorgeous celebrities that come out and say, oh, I'm gay then.
• 1:39:36
  What the hell are you talking about? You're not even pretending to be gay then. You want to be,
• 1:39:41
  you know, just a supermodel or sports illustrated swimsuit person. Stop pretending this. It's not
• 1:39:48
  allyship to buy into queerness. The bigger problem with it is, is the parents. And this is you
• 1:39:57
  sort of alluded to this before. Why can't you just be nice, Dana? Just be nice. Be kind.
• 1:40:04
  If a child says that they're trans, let them be trans. It's not a trivial thing. I went through
• 1:40:09
  all this. It is not a trivial thing. If you're not trans, nobody should recognize you as trans.
• 1:40:15
  You don't want to put your child, let alone anybody out. You don't put anybody, let alone your
• 1:40:19
  own child through that because you'll never live it down if you're wrong. But maybe part of the
• 1:40:25
  evolution now is that it can become less grave than it was. Then we don't want what happened to
• 1:40:34
  you to happen to other people. And therefore, if it's normalized, then maybe it just comes to mean
• 1:40:40
  my 13 year old is playing around with gender in a performative way. And we don't need to
• 1:40:48
  like medicalize that condition. Yeah, that would be fine. That's gay, right? That's just being
• 1:40:52
  gender not conforming. And the kid wants to wear a tutu and go to Ken Zooker's office and stuff.
• 1:40:58
  That's fine. We fought for that for decades. And now people at Tabestock in London and stuff,
• 1:41:05
  when it was open, you know, would come over and say, well, no, you know, if you really think that
• 1:41:11
  you're a little girl here, if you really think you're like girls, you know, you're probably a boy.
• 1:41:16
  There are people who've done that. There is documentation of this. And I mentioned Hillary
• 1:41:21
  Cass. The cast report was, what would you say? It was, she was brought in because she's a very
• 1:41:30
  well-respected pediatrician. And now a member of the House of Lords, as yesterday, by the way,
• 1:41:36
  believe it or not, she has a purge. But she was brought in because she didn't know anything about
• 1:41:41
  this field. So she was neutral. She had no access to grind, no dogs in this battle. So she was
• 1:41:50
  brought in to do a systematic evidence review. And she put out her preliminary results three years
• 1:41:56
  ago. And that really pissed a lot of people up because she said there's really no evidence that
• 1:42:00
  youth gender, youth transmedicalization works. I hate gender affirming care, the whole idea
• 1:42:07
  that you're affirming somebody's social construct, just the pulse me. So I won't use it. But it's
• 1:42:12
  youth transmedicalization, transidentified medicalization to be more accurate. And then the full
• 1:42:19
  report came out in April, 377 pages. I haven't read all of it yet. But it basically blew the
• 1:42:25
  door off all of this. And now the UK, including Scotland, as of today, has banned puberty blockers
• 1:42:33
  and youth transmedicalization. So and all the European nations that we look to because they did
• 1:42:41
  all the research proving that transsexualism is the thing that they're brain nuclei that are
• 1:42:46
  normally male. But in you guys, it's female. And you girls, it's normally female. But now you're
• 1:42:51
  a guy. Oh, yeah, that shows that you're trans, that it's real. They did all that work. We looked
• 1:42:57
  up to them because they were able to talk about sex and gender. And now, well, all of Europe,
• 1:43:02
  basically, I think France is on board and Germany's coming on board. I mean, Dana, just to touch
• 1:43:08
  on this biological basis for transsexualism, I can do you understand the reticence that people feel
• 1:43:17
  about the idea of requiring an objective medical test in order to affirm somebody's
• 1:43:28
  condition. I mean, in the sense that, you know, you've got the rise of the far right in Europe,
• 1:43:32
  you've got like, who knows what is going to become of liberal democracy, whether we'll all be
• 1:43:36
  living under authoritarian regimes in 50 years. Do we want to set a precedent where people's
• 1:43:42
  brains are being scanned to determine whether or not they have the condition of transsexualism?
• 1:43:47
  Actually, yes. But I want to, you, I'm going to call you on this because you wrote your
• 1:43:51
  sub-stack note. It's not a rise of far right in Europe. It's a rise that people are pissed off
• 1:43:55
  in immigration. It's a center right kind of phenomenon. The rise of the far left in this country
• 1:44:01
  and in Europe is what's destroying those countries, literally the far left, the squad kind of people
• 1:44:06
  like that. Most progressives aren't like it, but there are too many that have, they're allowed and
• 1:44:12
  they have, they have pull and power in government. I know what that's like, but look, I'm a physician.
• 1:44:19
  Before I make a diagnosis, I would work people up. If you had glaucoma, I would check your
• 1:44:25
  eye pressure, I would check your visual fields to see if you had lost any of that, etc.
• 1:44:31
  I would never, if you came in and said, hey, doc, I have glaucoma, operate on me, go, okay,
• 1:44:36
  well, you say you have glaucoma, well, you identify somebody with glaucoma, so I'm going to operate
• 1:44:40
  on you without proving that you have glaucoma. Why would I do that?
• 1:44:46
  I mean, take an analogous position of suppose they find the gaugin and then in order to get
• 1:44:52
  gay married, you need to be gay and I go and get a test and for some reason I don't have the
• 1:44:57
  gaugin, but I'm married to a guy. My marriage should, my marriage be null because I'm not gay.
• 1:45:02
  Yeah, clearly, clearly, down under because the Coriolis effect goes the other way, but this way,
• 1:45:09
  I don't know. Yeah, that's what happens if there's a trans person who has lived their entire life
• 1:45:13
  as a trans woman is acknowledged by their community as a trans as a woman, and you know,
• 1:45:21
  but it just so happens that their brain doesn't have the the transexual model that you want it to.
• 1:45:27
  Well, see, that's what happens when you develop new techniques,
• 1:45:32
  microscopes, telescopes and stuff to see things that we couldn't see beforehand or test. We
• 1:45:37
  have tests now to measure circulating DNA fragments of tumors of solid tumors in blood.
• 1:45:45
  Now, this is still young as far as development goes, but you might be able to pick up a stage one
• 1:45:52
  tumor just by doing a blood test. Don't you want to be able to do that? I mean, I think most
• 1:45:59
  people want to know if they have cancer so they can be treated for it. Unlike, well, if I'm trans and
• 1:46:04
  then you stick me in an MRI and it turns out I'm not trans, you're going to what? You're going to
• 1:46:09
  stick a dildo, you know, in my crotch and tell a bit of go around and say, I don't think that's
• 1:46:14
  going to happen. But if it prevents kids from going through the arduous transition process,
• 1:46:21
  and it is, for people who've watched the jazz, Jennings story and stuff, I've known jazz
• 1:46:26
  since she was six years old. She's gone through hell. It hasn't worked out well for her. You don't
• 1:46:32
  want that, you don't want her to be a role model for kids who aren't trans. Biologically speaking,
• 1:46:37
  this goes back to the statistics. Intersects, if you defend, if you define it in its broadest sense,
• 1:46:44
  including congenital adrenal hyperplasia, androgen and sensitivity syndrome,
• 1:46:49
  there are people who refuse to do that. They only want to use
• 1:46:52
  oval testes and others will give you ambiguous genitalia as intersex. But I'll
• 1:46:58
  we use the broader ways where you have people who are like ex, ex, but they are men for all intents
• 1:47:04
  and purposes and stuff like that. If you use that, you're talking about no more than two to two
• 1:47:10
  and a half percent of live births. So when you have 40 percent of brown students,
• 1:47:16
  my older son's alma mater, claiming to be LGBTQ, you realize that that's just an ideological game.
• 1:47:24
  You're not going to transition those people. It's just physically impossible that they are trans.
• 1:47:30
  Now you could make the case, and I wouldn't mind if you tried to make it that who cares whether
• 1:47:35
  it's biological. If I want to get a fellow class, if I'm a girl with a mastectomy, I should be
• 1:47:41
  able to get it as an adult. And if I'm an adult male, and if I want to have my penis inverted and
• 1:47:47
  made it into a vagina, I should be able to do that. I agree with that. My problem is should the
• 1:47:54
  government recognize you then as a woman or as a man? Again, I worked hard with Hillary to get
• 1:48:01
  removal of general reconstruction from legal definitions of trans people as male or female.
• 1:48:08
  With Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, as Secretary of State because she was in charge of
• 1:48:12
  the past sports. And back in those days, people would often go abroad to Thailand to get surgery,
• 1:48:17
  and they wanted to have the passport changed before they did that. So they bring a letter in,
• 1:48:21
  and the letter would state that yes, I'm so-and-so's doctor, and I'm going to do this.
• 1:48:25
  But then eventually with time, it was just dropped completely. I think the best way to get
• 1:48:31
  cross-dressers out of women's locker rooms and women's sports and such like that is simply to
• 1:48:36
  require general reconstruction. And the people who are really transsexual will still want to get
• 1:48:43
  their penises removed and inverted into vaginas. And the people who are like not a single male
• 1:48:50
  drag queen is going to want to do it. They're not affluent. Oh, and how a day since you can get it
• 1:48:56
  anywhere. But nothing. What do you mean? That's the insurance covers it, the Medicaid covers it.
• 1:49:03
  Not everywhere. I don't think it's covered in a-I don't think under most public health systems.
• 1:49:07
  I don't believe that it's covered in Australia. I mean, it may-
• 1:49:11
  No, it may. Well, maybe in some states. I'm sure that it's for-
• 1:49:14
  No, yeah. Okay, I take that back. I don't think that you can do-I don't think that just any old
• 1:49:21
  person can do it, put it that way. Like the framing that you just gave where it's like, you know,
• 1:49:26
  oh, I'm a grown-up person, so I'm just sort of allowed to just do this because I want to.
• 1:49:30
  You're not going to have access to public funds in Australia to do it. They would have to be a
• 1:49:34
  process. Okay, because you are a public health care system, but here you can get it all private
• 1:49:39
  insurers, most private insurers. Now, this is what we work for. This is what I did for 20 years
• 1:49:43
  to get people to recognize. This was a medical condition. Now, it's no longer a medical condition,
• 1:49:48
  so I don't think they should pay for it. But, you know, again, if somebody wants to do-
• 1:49:53
  Just zoom out here because I'm going to lose you in a- well, I'm not going to lose you. You're
• 1:49:57
  going to lose me because I have to go and take-go and get the kids. But the big picture thing here,
• 1:50:03
  and I think to one of the reasons why you probably emailed me after hearing the episode about Tickle
• 1:50:09
  and Giggle, was that there's been a decline in support for LGBTQ, I'll leave off the Q for your
• 1:50:17
  benefit, LGBT people. Well, that's, but it's the Q that leads to the decline in support-
• 1:50:24
  Destruction of the LGBTQ, right? Yeah, right. I mean, Q has a lot of meanings as well.
• 1:50:29
  I mean, I've used the word queer in the past simply to mean somebody who is a pan-sexual member
• 1:50:35
  of the entire tribe rather than referring to queer ideology. But I take your point about that
• 1:50:40
  definition of it. So, there's- after having decades and decades of increasing public support
• 1:50:46
  towards LGBT people, there's been a decline lately in support for the LGBT community.
• 1:50:53
  And some of the anxiety amongst gay lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals is that there's
• 1:51:02
  something about the way the conversation is being had on trans issues that it bleeding into
• 1:51:07
  the rest of everything. And people feel, you know, panicked, if they're especially if they're
• 1:51:12
  just small-sea conservative families, they're just in the Midwest, they see all of this who are
• 1:51:17
  in staff and the whole and then like gay marriage somehow gets tarnished because they associate
• 1:51:24
  it in their brains with all of this other stuff that we've been talking about of like the 15-year-old
• 1:51:31
  boy-in-class who's wearing a dress and calling themselves they them. Do you see that link?
• 1:51:37
  Yeah, oh, there's no question about it. You see it here. I mean, the support for marriage
• 1:51:42
  equality had risen to like 68-70% the past couple of years. And now it's down into the 50s,
• 1:51:49
  Republicans are down in the 40s. This goes back to the situation when people who are opposing
• 1:51:55
  marriage equality would say, well, if you open that door up, then the slippery slope, right?
• 1:52:01
  The next thing is going to be this, they're going to be grooming your kids, etc., etc. That never
• 1:52:07
  happened, right? Just the way I said, transsexuals never caused male sexual predators to dress
• 1:52:13
  up as women to go in bathrooms and rape women. There were so few of us, it just was,
• 1:52:17
  it would have been a stupid thing for any guy to do. And you don't have to dress up as a woman
• 1:52:21
  to go into a woman's bathroom and rape a girl. But as time has gone on now, the past 10 years
• 1:52:27
  with queerness and everybody coming out this way and you know, 5% of this class and 10% of that class
• 1:52:33
  and up to 40% of the class of brown, then people are looking at this and go, it's out of control.
• 1:52:39
  And I see this, I've seen this in progressivism. This is why I mentioned Barney
• 1:52:43
  and it being a pragmatic progressive. I watched the progressive movement inflow in the late 60s
• 1:52:49
  and early 70s. It literally imploded with bombs when they were bombing Army recruitment centers
• 1:52:55
  and they blow themselves up, preparing the bombs. These were not technically very adept people.
• 1:53:00
  This is the weather underground if you remember that phrase and stuff. The progressive movement,
• 1:53:04
  which deserves a lot of credit back in the 1890s, you know, unions and shot labor laws and food
• 1:53:13
  and drug protections and all that. And then in the 30s with FDR and the New Deal and then in the 60s,
• 1:53:20
  with LBJ with civil rights, women's rights, housing rights and then gay rights in 69,
• 1:53:26
  followed up with trans rights. If you think that because you've accomplished that, the revolution
• 1:53:32
  is around the corner and if people don't want to listen to you, you'll just bomb them.
• 1:53:38
  Then you're going to blow up the movement and the progressive movement ended in the mid 70s
• 1:53:44
  and did not rise again until after the crash of 08 and the Occupy Wall Street movement.
• 1:53:49
  And now we're seeing the exact same thing. Wokeness is a result of the culture changing
• 1:53:56
  enough, the atmosphere changing that people felt comfortable enough to promote race essentialism,
• 1:54:03
  sex, erasure, gender, non-essentialism, whatever, the 100 plus gender identities you want to be.
• 1:54:10
  And then we went from the go back, I remember this for, gay people first simply asked for tolerance.
• 1:54:20
  Right? Let's just tolerate our neighbors. This is America we can do this.
• 1:54:24
  Then they wanted acceptance. Please accept us. We want to be a part of the American family.
• 1:54:30
  Okay. Now over the past decade, it's moved into affirmation.
• 1:54:36
  It's not enough that I accept you. This is who you are. This is who you say you are.
• 1:54:40
  I have to affirm that this is who you are. If you say you're a woman, but I look at you and I see
• 1:54:45
  clearly you're not, then I'm the bigot and you're not crazy. And now it's celebration.
• 1:54:51
  This is why we have 146 days of pride in America. Believe it or not. Every single sub-cultural group has
• 1:55:01
  to have its day of pride. Every school room has to have a pride flag and spring bows and everything
• 1:55:07
  like that. It's the, you had Yasha Moko, right? Yeah, I love you. Yeah, yeah, that was I just
• 1:55:13
  listened to that. Yasha is a great guy. I know him here because he lives here. And I've been reading
• 1:55:19
  persuasion forever and four years forever. So it's been there. But Yasha is a really cool guy.
• 1:55:24
  And Yasha wrote the book. You praised it on the rise of identitarianism based on. I don't think
• 1:55:30
  he used that term. I think it's called the identity trap. Right. The identity trap. But I think I created
• 1:55:35
  identitarianism. It reminded me from my college years of studying the Enlightenment, European
• 1:55:41
  Intellectual History. The Enlightenment was from the mid-17th century up to like the French Revolution.
• 1:55:48
  But then there was a backlash, the romantic movement, you know, Beethoven and Hermann Hesse and all
• 1:55:53
  that stuff. That's where we are now. Where identity were feelings. My feelings mattered to me.
• 1:55:59
  Feelings don't matter in politics. I don't care about your feelings. I don't care if I hurt your
• 1:56:03
  feelings. My job as a physician is to treat you to make a diagnosis and treat you so you can go
• 1:56:08
  on and live your life the way you want. Not to go, oh, you say your trans. So I'm going to simply
• 1:56:13
  accept that and act accordingly. It's not scientific. It's not medical. And it's not kind.
• 1:56:19
  It's what somebody called another one of your fellow substaters called a suicidal empathy.
• 1:56:26
  This is like inviting immigrants in who don't want to be a part of your society. They want to
• 1:56:31
  take over. They want Sharia law. They want to caliphate. Why in the world are you bringing me
• 1:56:35
  to that? Because you feel sorry. They're refugees. They're the refugees from the Syrian Civil War.
• 1:56:40
  Somebody has to take them. Well, you know, now we're seeing the consequences. So I think you have
• 1:56:46
  to make you have to draw lines here. It's good to be open-minded and tolerant and accepting. But
• 1:56:54
  if that then slides into affirmation and celebration. And if I don't want to participate,
• 1:57:00
  I'm the bad person here. That's not acceptable. And I think that's why the numbers in support of
• 1:57:06
  LGBT people have been rather rapidly decreasing. This is all the last two years. Is it making you a
• 1:57:14
  life hotter? Yeah. How? Well, you know, people will look at number one. I've lost many of my
• 1:57:25
  progressive friends. When I tried to speak science to them in medicine, they would go just be kind.
• 1:57:32
  And then they said, I can't take this anymore. I'm leaving this list server, whatever.
• 1:57:37
  And they self-deported as Romney called it back in the day. But, you know, I didn't leave.
• 1:57:42
  And the list moderator is a friend of mine and he knew I was right. And you know, I'm going to
• 1:57:47
  be proven right with this. But I don't like the fact that so many of these people, so many
• 1:57:52
  friends of mine, have been willing to queer their kids simply because they're queer. I can say,
• 1:57:56
  I'm trans or I'm non-binary. And they go along with it. And I can tell you, I think it's
• 1:58:03
  who said it was at Helen Lewis, who made the, made a statement. I think it's called the Anota syndrome,
• 1:58:09
  the amount of little lieutenant Anota, the Japanese soldier who was found on a, on a Pacific island
• 1:58:15
  in 1975 and he thought the war was still going. They had to bring his captain in to get him out.
• 1:58:20
  He wouldn't just go out. He wouldn't believe anybody. This is what happens. If you're a parent who's
• 1:58:24
  transition your kid, you'll never get over that. Now, maybe that kid will grow up to be a happy
• 1:58:31
  kind of person, probably not because here's another thing we didn't talk about at all. But it's a fact
• 1:58:37
  that cis people don't like dating trans people. They don't want to be intimate with trans people.
• 1:58:44
  When I dated cis men after my transition and came out to that, a really good relationship,
• 1:58:50
  but then I decided I'm not living a lie again. I lived a lie for 50 years. I'm not going to do it
• 1:58:54
  again. I came out, they stood up and walked out every single time. That's the men. And then I go,
• 1:59:00
  okay, well, maybe I know what it's like to be with women. So I'll deal with the women.
• 1:59:04
  And still, the lesbians go, no, I ain't no penis or anything. This isn't like 85% of people
• 1:59:10
  who transition today do not have general reconstruction. And they're saying, you're going to love my lady,
• 1:59:16
  Dick, or I'm going to beat the crap out of you. This, you see this, it's out there. It's on Twitter
• 1:59:21
  and it's elsewhere. I don't think that's a good place to be. And that makes my life worse.
• 1:59:26
  But the worst part for me as a physician is that after having beaten the Ken Sookers and the
• 1:59:32
  Ray Blanchards back in the late 90s and the Oats, we beat them with the science, the science
• 1:59:40
  of the Europeans had given us. They're back now because Ray Blanchard is saying, well, most of these,
• 1:59:48
  you know, adult men who are transitioning, they're all autogonophilic. And now people ask me
• 1:59:53
  this question, if I'm talking to them, I speak to Megan Dom and others like that. And you go,
• 1:59:56
  well, what do you think about autogonophilia? I said, I thought we had, that was dead and buried.
• 2:00:01
  I thought I had buried that 20 years ago. It's back because people who aren't trans or out there
• 2:00:07
  talking about that kind of thing. That doesn't have my life. You've got, you've got boogie men
• 2:00:14
  that you thought you'd put to rest a generation ago in terms of cliches and caricatures about
• 2:00:20
  you that are coming back up because other people who aren't who don't have your condition
• 2:00:27
  are claiming to speak on your behalf. Right. And removing the credibility that you work so hard
• 2:00:34
  to build up. Yeah, that's right. Now, I was part of the team that rewrote or revised, I guess,
• 2:00:40
  or revised the DSM for. It used to be gender identity disorder. We got to change. I coined the term
• 2:00:47
  gender incongruence, which I realized now is a mistake because we conflated sex and gender of the
• 2:00:52
  terms. There's synonyms in the federal register, federal law does not distinguish between sex and
• 2:00:57
  gender. Sex stereotypes, gender stereotypes, the same thing. Now it matters because now they've
• 2:01:03
  erased sex. Biology doesn't matter and all that matters is gender and 100 genders, gender
• 2:01:08
  identities and stuff like that. So it's become a bit of chaos. But by changing the DSM from gender
• 2:01:14
  identity disorder from a medical illness, a mental health illness because it's in the DSM,
• 2:01:20
  the gender dysphoria, which means just discomfort with your body. We help make people feel more
• 2:01:27
  comfortable. We help their feelings of being alienated and isolated and stuff. It's dysphoria.
• 2:01:35
  I wanted the name gender, I had incongruence, but you can't build that. You have to, you need a
• 2:01:40
  title that's billable for psychiatrists. So they made the final decision. Looking at medicine,
• 2:01:45
  it's always like that. So I accepted that. Yeah, okay, you got to do that. But the text says gender
• 2:01:50
  incongruence. So you don't need it. You didn't need a brain test. You didn't need any of that
• 2:01:54
  because we didn't have it. Look, we never had any proof going back 100 years. So we were talking
• 2:02:00
  about Eddie Redman and Lily Elf. There's never been any proof that any trans woman or trans man
• 2:02:06
  is truly a trans person because we'd never had the test to prove it. I think getting that and
• 2:02:13
  showing that it exists would be very helpful. I don't think we should apply it to people who
• 2:02:18
  transitioned 30 years ago. What difference is that going to make them adapted? Their families
• 2:02:22
  adapted. Their neighbors have adapted. But you can prevent kids from thinking, this is cool.
• 2:02:27
  Instead of cutting, I will just change my gender and everything will be cool off friends in school.
• 2:02:33
  No, better to have a test that proves that that's not the case. If you're diabetic,
• 2:02:38
  if you're A1C is normal, you're not diabetic. I don't care what you tell me. You could pretend
• 2:02:42
  to be diabetic, but no internist is going to treat you as a diabetic. It sounds to me,
• 2:02:47
  Dana. They're basically needs to be a clear firewall built between the medical conditions
• 2:02:56
  that we're talking about and biological sex and transsexualism. Then the liberation that we
• 2:03:06
  as social libertarians may want for adults who want to play in the sociological space of
• 2:03:15
  gender self-expression in non-conforming ways. Yeah, well for that. I work closely with the gay
• 2:03:22
  community before we were able to get trans-appended to the LGBT to be able to do that. All the legislation
• 2:03:28
  that we passed on the state and local level all says gender identity and gender expression.
• 2:03:36
  So all of that legislation was protecting gender non-conforming gay people because
• 2:03:44
  they didn't have those protections. Bostock created the federal protections on gender non-conformity.
• 2:03:51
  There were court cases that they gave people that, but in general, there was nothing there that
• 2:03:57
  said gender non-conformity or gender expression in general was protected. The trans community made
• 2:04:04
  that happen because it was gender identity more to the point perceived gender identity. If somebody
• 2:04:10
  thinks you're really a man but you're a woman, etc., and then fires you or doesn't hire you
• 2:04:15
  with something, you have a case and gender expression. If you're a butcher and you don't want to
• 2:04:19
  work dresses and stuff like that, you can go on from there. So this stuff is complicated. It's
• 2:04:26
  confusing. The language again, it's gender and sex were synonymous. One of the geniuses of American
• 2:04:32
  law is that these terms are ambiguous. I remember in college reading the M's in seven types of
• 2:04:40
  ambiguity. I think people could really learn something from reading that again. These terms
• 2:04:45
  were on that big. We didn't even define race. The 1964 civil rights act was based on race.
• 2:04:49
  That doesn't say African Americans or people of African descent. It just says race. So that other
• 2:04:54
  people who then felt they had a case like Asians or Hispanics can say, you're discriminating against
• 2:05:02
  me on the basis of race. That's the beauty of it. That's where it's flexible enough to expand and allow.
• 2:05:08
  And that's the same thing with sex. Title 7 in 1964 said, you cannot discriminate because of sex.
• 2:05:15
  Three words because of sex. What does that mean? We've been arguing over that now for 60 years.
• 2:05:21
  And we used it with very good gay lawyers, gay Jewish lawyers for that matter, in order to
• 2:05:29
  make the case and win our rights in 2020. I thought that was it. I was retiring in 2020. I thought
• 2:05:37
  that was going to be the end of it. Instead. So you're right. It's been harder. I'm okay. I can
• 2:05:44
  take it. I'm fixed in. I'm old. I have my granddaughters. I'm not worried about me, but I see what it
• 2:05:50
  does to a lot of my colleagues who've been through the same thing. And it's just that's unfortunate.
• 2:05:55
  Well, good on you. Thank you for fighting the good fight. Godspeed these next four months in
• 2:06:00
  the presidential madness. In what I've become of our culture. It's great to see you again and
• 2:06:07
  great to say the same year. We'll be in touch online. You have really good guests and stuff that
• 2:06:15
  yasha thing. Right. Talking about your mentor. And then you're, you know, your Hungarian ancestor.
• 2:06:23
  They really do where it comes from. You need to do ancestry.com. You need to. Yeah.
• 2:06:28
  You know, I did 23 and man. It was all exactly what you would expect, but that I don't break it
• 2:06:32
  down by. Yeah. Well, you know, steps. Have you ever, have you ever been to Hungary? Yeah. Yes,
• 2:06:36
  you have. You've been to Budapest, right? Yeah. Like there's a town in southern Hungary on the
• 2:06:41
  border with Serbia called second. S-Z-E-G-E-D. I drove through there. Close enough. And that sort of says,
• 2:06:47
  that's sort of like when I heard zaps, like, oh, well, he's a European Jew, but I think he's
• 2:06:51
  Hungarian and stuff. Yeah. But you don't even know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't care. Thanks again.
• 2:06:59
  Dana. It's a pleasure. Take care of yourself. Good to see you.