Courage in the Face of Book Burners
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. First of all, for everyone who celebrates, and for those who don't, Shana Tova, Happy New Year. According to the Hebrew calendar, it is now 5782, and I'm wishing all of you a sweet and healthy and happy year.

Yesterday, I attended synagogue in person for the first time in a really, really long time. And though there were masks and lots of vaccine checks and cameras for the people still Zooming at home, at least we were there. And after the frustration and the confusion and the loneliness of this past year, it felt really good to have our butts in the seats. And it was a really good reminder to be grateful for the fact that awkwardly, slowly, we're

But hopefully, inevitably, we're going to reach the other side of the pandemic. Today's episode is a little bit different. What I'm doing is I'm releasing the audio of a subscriber-only Zoom that I held last week with my friend Abigail Schreier.

For those who don't know, my newsletter, which is hosted on Substack, it's what keeps the lights on over here. So those who choose to subscribe, and it's only $5 a month, you are supporting everything that we do. You are supporting the ragtag group of editors and reporters and writers and producers who are making this podcast and who are planning for lots of other special projects in the future.

Over on the Substack, we recently did an event with the Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad just days after the FBI foiled a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap her from her Brooklyn apartment. We also did a great one with Paul Rossi and Andrew Gutman, the teacher and the parent who blew the whistle on the broken culture of New York City's elite private schools.

I love doing live events. And while this doesn't come close to it, at least it's better than where we've been. And I hope to do more and more of them going forward. So if you haven't heard of Abigail Schreier, she is a lawyer. She's a reporter. She's an author. But I suspect if you know her name, it's probably in the context of her book, Irreversible Damage, which takes on the super light and not at all controversial subject of gender dysphoria.

Specifically, the book is about teenage girls who are suddenly announcing to their families in unprecedented numbers that they are transgender and that not only are they transgender, that they're taking the steps to medically transition, often in the context of a system that's not set up to challenge them, which is one of the topics that Abigail and I get into today. The other reason I think it's so important to talk to Abigail is because the reaction to her book

is like a 21st century example of book burning. But instead of pyres in the town square, it's online firestorms on social media. Abigail's been accused of lots of things. She's been accused of spreading misinformation by GLAAD. A very prominent lawyer for the ACLU called for her book to be banned.

A favorable review of irreversible damage in the publication Science-Based Medicine ignited such an online mob that the journal disappeared that first review and replaced it with a negative one that was riddled with errors. Amazon and Target have also been pressured to drop the book from their websites. And of course, Abigail's been called every name in the book. But it hasn't worked.

And despite being completely ignored by big outlets like the New York Times Book Review, Abigail's book has been an enormous bestseller. In part, that's just because of grassroots support for it. Parents felt so passionately about this book that they took out billboards on their own dime advertising for it. Both the subject that Abigail writes about and the treatment of her book deserve your attention.

And whether you agree with her take that girls with gender dysphoria shouldn't be able to medically transition without their parents' knowledge, that's not really the point. The point is that the questions she asks are not just legitimate, they're incredibly important. And some of the most powerful forces in our culture are conspiring to silence them. But asking questions and asking questions that are important and relevant, that's exactly the reason that I have a podcast.

Now, this is a 40-minute conversation, and we don't get into every single important aspect of transgender rights and transgender history and gender identity. But progress only comes when we have the freedom to riff and experiment and disagree and to do so in public and out loud.

And that's a lesson that many of our online platforms and many of our most prominent journalists seem to have forgotten. So I think it's very important to seek out those voices that have been shut out of channels that ought to be open to them, to look for the stories that have been ignored or overlooked or lied about, and to tell them. We'll be back after this. Stay with us.

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Abigail, I guess I want to start with why this particular subject? How did you stumble into it? So, you know, I really didn't want it. I wrote one op-ed tangentially on transgender issues. It was just about the compulsory pronoun laws. I'm still a lawyer. And, you know, there are laws in New York and California now that penalize people with civil and criminal penalties if you fail to use someone's proper pronoun. Right.

that's just obviously unconstitutional in America. You can't make people say anything in this country. You can't even make them salute the flag. So I pointed that out in the Wall Street Journal and I got a letter from a mom who said to me, I've written to every journalist I can find, maybe you'll take this up, but my daughter, you know, she had always been a girly girl. She was never suffering from anything like gender dysphoria, which is the severe discomfort in one's biological sex. But in college,

with her girlfriends, but she was always socially awkward and she was plagued by anxiety and depression. And in college, she went off to college. She really wanted to fit in. And with her girlfriends, they all decided they were transgender. And within the first semester, she had started a course of testosterone. And the mother told me that no journalist wanted to take this up. And I immediately said about it, I said, don't worry, I'll find you a good investigative reporter. And I couldn't find one. Nobody wanted this issue. And why didn't they want to touch the issue?

You know, I can't really say, but everyone knows this is the nerve center of the culture right now. It is the area in which we're all told we're not allowed to have an opinion. We're not allowed to push back. Anything that occurs under what they've decided is the, you know, umbrella of LGBTQ can never be questioned.

And the parents reaching out to me were by and large political progressives. They were people who were very comfortable with gay rights, with LGBTQ pride and all of that. They had supported gay marriage long before it was legal in this country, but they just didn't think this was right for their daughters. And no one wanted to touch this. But, you know...

And so at first, I really, I didn't touch it. I gave it to someone. I gave it to a really respected investigative journalist. And I waited three months and I gave her all my contacts and nothing happened. And so after three months, I was still thinking about this woman. And I got back in touch with her and I said, all right, just tell me.

Just tell me your story. And we just went from there. What is the argument of the book Irreversible Damage for those who haven't read it? Give us the broad outline of this book. So in the last decade, there's been a sudden and sharp spike in teenage girls claiming to have gender dysphoria, claiming to be just uncomfortable in their biological sex, identifying as transgender and pressing for hormones and surgeries and easily obtaining them. And the reason this is surprising and worth...

inquiring about is not only because so many of these kids suddenly have this self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria, but because we have a hundred year history of gender dysphoria, and this is not what it looks like. It was always began in early... Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. What does it look like? It always began in early childhood, ages two to four, and it was overwhelmingly boys. There were women who experienced gender dysphoria as little girls, but overwhelmed

overwhelmingly it was male. And left alone, most of them grew out of it. And some of them grew up, many of them became gay men and some of them went on to be what we used to call transsexuals. But in the last decade, out of nowhere, the predominant demographic is now teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria.

and they are coming out with their friends. So what it didn't really look like gender dysphoria, what it looked more like was a social contagion. What do you mean when you say a social contagion? I think of things like cutting or anorexia or bulimia that were extremely prevalent when I was a girl, 14, 15, 16 years old in high school.

So social contagions are any of these things, usually it's talked about in a negative sense, but of course there have been, you know, what we used to call crazes that were not negative, that were positive. This one happens to be, you know, quite negative because of the

irreversible harm, but it's anything that's communicated peer to peer and encourages this self harm. So we see this with cutting. We see it even with suicide. Teenage girls, especially are very open to suggestion by their peers. And if they think their girlfriends are, are,

involved in something, they really want to share their pain. And so we know this, the anorexia spreads this way. And in hospital wards, they always are very careful to keep anorexics apart and to handle them very carefully because if they don't, these girls will encourage each other to become more and more anorexic. There's an article that came out today from Vice, a publication I don't usually promote, but it's a fascinating article about this study that

that there has been this explosion in rapid onset tick disorders. So Tourette-like symptoms among girls between the ages of 12 and 25 throughout this pandemic. They're calling it an epidemic inside a pandemic. And what they're finding is so fascinating is one, in general, Tourette's, people with Tourette's skew heavily male. And these are almost all young girls and young women. And they're finding that

And they are almost all saying that the nexus of their symptoms began while watching TikTok influencers with Tourette's or other extreme tic symptoms. There's a particular example in the story that blew my mind where they were all repeating the same word in their symptoms, which was the word beans, which

which was taking after a very influential TikTok young woman with Tourette's. And what the doctors are saying is these symptoms are real, meaning these girls cannot control the symptoms, but they're describing this as very much a kind of social contagion. I read this, I read your book, and I'm thinking,

Help me understand, what is it about girls and young women that make them more susceptible to this kind of peer-to-peer influence, this kind of, I don't want to say herd mentality, but it's almost like a group behavior. In a way, you could see the positive side of it, that it's somehow kind of an outgrowth of

of empathy or compassion. That's exactly what it is. It's girls try to meet their friends where they are and they try to support their friends and agree with their friends as a way of showing love. The problem is when a teenage girl is experimenting in self-harm, her friend's natural impulse will be to share her negative thoughts

to dwell on a negative experience with her if she wants to. So dwell on a breakup, dwell on her pain and ruminate on it. And that can lead them both down a very negative and unhealthy path. And that's

You know, that's what we're seeing. And add to that social media, as you brought up. Look, social media is having all kinds of impact on these young kids, and it's sort of rewiring their circuitry in all kinds of ways. I mean, you see this with porn and erectile dysfunction. We are now seeing young men with erectile dysfunction. We've never seen this before.

Truly, if there was one thing evolution set up young men to be able to do, it was to get an erection. And now they are truly suffering. And I've interviewed pediatricians who say it's absolutely true. I have 15, 16-year-olds coming in asking for Viagra. Wow. Wow. And is that... Do doctors and do the early studies or do you and your reporting? Are you finding that that is because...

young men are getting their ideas about what sex is and their expectations about sex from online porn? Where is this coming from? Well, they certainly are. I mean, they're seeing it at a much, much early age. They're, I mean, you know, they talk about the reason for the erectile dysfunction. Apparently, this is not my research.

But apparently, as many articles have been written on this now, and apparently it's because the variety is exciting and you don't get that much. The variety and volume is very exciting and you don't get that kind of variety and sheer quantity in real life.

So when young men become used to this variety and they're seeing a tremendous amount of very violent and very diverse online porn, they no longer can be turned on by real life experiences.

Tell us, if you would, Abigail, just to like add a little bit of meat to the bones. Tell us a story from the book that exemplifies the kind of phenomenon that you've been talking about. Tell us about one of the young women that you write about, if you would. Okay, I can talk. One young woman, this is a very typical story. She went off very bright. These were precocious middle class and upper middle class, predominantly white girls. And she had a lot of, once middle school hit, she was a very, very, very, very, very, very,

Her name is Helena. And once middle school hit, she became really uncomfortable in her body. She started gaining a little weight and she sort of engaged her peers in a sort of boyish way. And all of a sudden that wasn't acceptable. All the girls seemed to know how to sort of primp for the boys and act flirtatious. And she just didn't quite know how to do that.

And she started watching a lot of, you know, social media. And online, you find tons of influencers, you know, trans influencers who can't wait to teach you that if you feel uncomfortable in your body, you're probably a boy. So with a group of friends, she decided to come out in high school as trans. And all of a sudden, like so many of the girls I write about, she was subject to so much celebration in her peers. She was suddenly the in-group, part of the in-group.

And she couldn't wait. And then she started fixating on the moment she would get testosterone because that's the next thing you're pushed to. Okay, you're really trans. Let's prove it. You know, prove it. You say you're trans, but you still look like a girl. And so the moment she turned 18, she drove straight to a clinic and within one session, a one hour session, and not even being advised of all of the negative side effects, she was prescribed testosterone and began using it.

So it's one thing to be influenced by another teenager, maybe thousands of miles away on the internet. It's quite another thing to go to a doctor's office and after an hour or a few hour sessions, be sort of pushed or affirmed would be the language in a particular direction. Explain how it is to me.

that there is such consensus among all of the major medical institutions and associations on this issue. We have the American Psychiatric Association. We have the American Academy of Pediatrics. We have the Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. I could go on. How is it that they're all sort of in lockstep about the right way to give transgender medical care services

Sort of regardless of the circumstances. The answer is institutional capture. It's the same thing that's happened to the ACLU, the ADL and every major organization in American life that was once revered and important and rightly, you know, you know, looked up to because doctors don't agree with this.

If you talk to doctors, they're appalled. They know that a one-hour visit to a clinic when you're 15 in the state of Oregon, and in the state of Oregon, you don't need your parents' permission. You can go to a clinic at age 15, walk away that day with a course of testosterone without even the therapist's note. They know that's crazy. And worse, they know this isn't necessarily gender dysphoria, and they know the whole business of affirmative care removes their judgment from the equation. Right?

It's madness, right? Because what it's saying is to the doctors, you forget your judgment. We're not here for you to exercise your judgment. You're here to agree with the patient. Your 15-year-old patient's going to tell you what she has.

Well, we saw the same thing with the opioid crisis, where doctors were just rubber stamping and we saw what happened. And that's what they're doing right now with testosterone. Good doctors are walking away from this because they're saying, I don't want any part in this madness. I'm just going to refer you to someone else. And activist doctors are making money hand over fist. There are lots of people, liberals, progressives, but also conservatives who say, you know, if we look back 50 years ago,

to the way that lesbians and gays were talked about in this country, what was normative, the way to describe them, to describe homosexuality as a mental disorder, they would look maybe at what's going on in the world of transgender care and say, Abigail, get with the times. Like, if you want to be on the right side of history, it's very clear, you know,

that getting ahead of this and not suggesting that people are sort of unwell or whatever is the wrong way to go about it. I know exactly what you're trying to say. So why isn't this just like what gays went through? Oh my God, there's a panic, another moral panic. They're going to make everyone gay. They're going to spread their gayness, right? Is this just the same thing? Well, it's nothing like that, actually. Remember,

Remember that kids who come out as gay, they don't start chopping off body parts. Okay. This is part of an extreme ideology that has nothing to do with transgender people at all, really. And I know a lot of transgender adults. They do not pretend they were always magically a woman starting at age 35. What's about Buck Angel to give people one sense? Sure. So, you know, one of the most outspoken and brave people

trans men on this issue is Buck Angel, although he likes, he prefers the term transsexual. You know, Buck, I interviewed him for my book and he will tell you, he's a close friend and he will tell you that, you know, he doesn't pretend he was always a guy. He's very honest.

And he does not believe that these kids are suddenly discovering a true and sustainable or enduring transgender identity when they're rushing in friend groups to the clinics. He knows this is crazy. And anyone, honestly, who's being honest about it, has to say that these are highly experimental treatments. Buck doesn't.

Chuck transitioned after, as an adult, after years of therapy and attempting to really, you know, wrestle with what he wanted to be for his future and how he wanted to present to the world. These kids are making this decision with their friends at a very young age, at an age when teenagers make all kinds of bad decisions. The argument that we would get from the other side, I believe, and that it's very easy everywhere on the internet, of course, is,

Parents and doctors and teachers and other adults in their life who deprive children who identify as transgender of affirmative care are basically condemning them to mental illness and suicide. That's the argument that you hear, which is that to deprive them of this

means that they will hurt themselves in some very serious way. I'd love for you to respond to that argument. Yeah, it's not only a complete lie, but with no evidence behind it, we have no good evidence to suggest that affirmative care either cures suicidality or that suicidality is caused by not being affirmed or by gender dysphoria. We have no proof of any of this. But

But it's a very dangerous and reckless lie because they go around a lot of these, even the activist doctors, and they go around saying it over and over to kids.

that they will kill themselves if they don't transition. Well, we know that suicide itself is contagious. Kids are really suggestible about this. This isn't my work. Others have documented this. There's a great book called Strange Contagion about this community, this high school in San Francisco area where the kids started imitating each other and killing themselves in the space of one year.

You don't go around telling kids that they're likely to commit suicide unless something happens because they could start believing it. But in any case, you know, the number of lies that get told about this are legion. And, you know, I wrote the book because there was just so much deception. There was so much untruth. Girls are being terribly harmed.

And frankly, too few people were standing up. The reaction to your book, needless to say, has been unhinged. The American Booksellers Association offered this Soviet-style apology, apologizing for a serious, violent incident for the crime of, I think, selling an ad for your book or giving out the paperback to it, something along those lines. It sounded like they had mass-murdered people. Why...

Is the reaction so, so over the top? What are you getting at that they don't want people to hear or learn? They're very angry about my book because it's not a conservative book. It's not a religious book. It's not a conservative book. I didn't have a dog in this race. It really is just a journalistic exploration. So people who read it are often very convinced by it.

So all these people who are counting on no oversight, they want to be able to indoctrinate children freely with no parental monitoring. They want to be able to give courses of treatment that are highly experimental without premeditation.

properly disclosing the risks or being honest about them. They want to be able to do this without anyone questioning them. So they're infuriated that someone is speaking up about it in a way that's convincing people to say, hey, hold on. There are risks to every medication. Isn't shooting up a woman's body 10 to 40 times the level of testosterone her body would normally handle? Isn't that a little dangerous? Shouldn't we be concerned with the long-term risks of which we are entirely ignorant?

What are their end goals?

There are a couple of different things. But, you know, just this week we got some indicate, you know, I certainly got some indication. I wrote a piece for my sub stack about what's going on in the schools, which is that they're they've they've instituted. I write about this in the book, but someone sent me actually the full form, which I had never seen completely filled out. There's something called the gender support plan. And it's in. Sorry. It said it sounds great. Like a lot. Who doesn't want gender support? Right.

But it's filled out. What happens is a child, a minor of any age, after being encouraged, and I documented this, there's a lot of indoctrination in the public schools and in some private schools about gender. You might be any, they tell kindergartners, only you know your true gender. You could be any gender. And then they list them all for children, non-binary, agender. And so at some point, a kid goes through a hard time and picks one.

The school then fills out a gender, they whip out a gender support plan and they say, oh, you're trans. Why don't we fill out a name, a new name and a gender for you and we don't have to tell your parents. In fact, we will hide it from them. So we'll just keep it within the school community. So a community, a school community of, I don't know, a thousand people will be referring to this child for a year by a new name and gender and the parents will be kept in the dark deliberately. Right?

Okay, so there are a couple of things here that when I wrote about this, the activists online went bananas. They went bananas. In a way, I haven't seen them go in a year. And I think they are really scared that their unmonitored access to your children will be cut off. That is a perfect tee up for me, what's at the heart of why this subject is important. A is sort of making war on language itself.

It gets everyone to say that a trans woman is the same thing as a biological woman. And that once you've given into that, what else can you go along with? So that's one reason. It's kind of about controlling the language. And I think another is that it seems to be sort of breaking the relationship between parents and their children.

and replacing that core relationship with a relationship toward a bureaucracy maybe,

School administrators may be an ideological movement. Maybe that part is less clear to me. But those two things seem to kind of be at the core of this. Am I getting that right? Completely. I mean, getting you to parrot lies is the one thing if not, if we if we do nothing else today, you know, if we can agree on one, you know, nothing else. One of the things that I think everyone who's listening should should really consider is that it is you do incredible harm when you parrot lies in public.

You cannot recite public lies. We should all refuse to do it because we are at war with an ideology which is increasingly narrowing our freedoms. And one of their tools is to force you to say trans women are women, which we all know not to be true. Of course, we extend full civil rights to all transgender people. Of course, we extend all kinds of courtesies. I personally use, you know, whatever pronouns people would like me to. But

but I will not parrot lies. And really no one should. Now, in terms of separating, prying children away from their parents, it's precisely what they're doing. And a lot of the activists went online and say, you know, accused me and they said, you're forcing teachers to out a child to the parents.

Of course I'm not. This is not about outing a child. This is about a school-wide conspiracy to encourage a new identity in a 12-year-old and to then conceal it from the parents. I just talked to a woman today. I was in touch with a woman today who in Florida walked through the halls of the school and the teachers all pretended they weren't calling the child by a different name and pronoun in front of the mother. They will lie to your face.

And the problem with all this, of course, is that not only does it teach the child that home is an unsafe place, which teachers will tell the children, home is an unsafe place for an LGBTQ child. This is what they recite. But they will also completely alienate the child from the parents. And they also push along the transition. Because when a child has been identifying as Blake for a year, it's really hard to go back to being Sally. Right.

You write in the most recent piece on Substack, which we'll share in the chat. I recommend it to everyone who hasn't read it yet. You write in the piece that the most critical cultural battle that is sort of on the horizon is the fight against America's activist teachers. Tell us about why you think that is going to be the most important battle. And also, if you would, about what

normal parents, non-professional political activist parents are doing to push back against this? So I think this is the battle because I think the...

I think the battle against the doctors will, I think, will be won. I think that people are starting, the number of young women who are coming forward and saying, I wasn't apprised of the risks. I was pushed to do this. I regret it. There's a lot. Sweden, Finland, UK have all cut back on transitioning treatments for minors or ended them because of the lack of good data on the benefits.

And I think the lawsuits will come in America and we'll solve that. The bigger problem to me is that we have these activist teachers who really regard themselves as entitled to indoctrinate your children. It's a much harder battle to win. And

Parents are finally waking up to the fact that it's even going on, but parents are under a lot of pressure. They have a lot of distraction. And frankly, monitoring all the things being taught in school, they just didn't have the sort of, you know, dark imagination to imagine that people would be doing this, you know, teaching Black children not to trust their white parents.

teaching young girls to hate their own bodies. They never imagined that the teachers would be doing this, but they are. One of the things that I find, and then we're going to go to questions so strange about this moment in time and our present politics regarding this issue, is that

How is it the progressive position that we should, rather than saying to the 11-year-old, the 12-year-old, the 13-year-old girl, I'm thinking about myself, who is maybe a tomboy, maybe doesn't feel like they want to be a girl like every other kind of girl. Why isn't the message to them, you know what? Being a girl is whatever you are. That's what it is to be a girl. Let's expand the sort of social categories. Let's expand the...

Social construct or I don't know if you like that language, but let's expand. Would it be a girl to be a girl? Does it mean to necessarily get eyelash extensions? Although I have those on right now or Botox or wear a pushup bra or any of the other dumb stereotypes you used to read about in places like Teen Vogue. Being a girl is whatever you want it to be. Now, all of a sudden, progressive responses, if you don't feel like a girl,

Our response to you is not, let's just expand the idea of what it is to be a girl. It's let's medicalize you and let's get you on a track that makes you hyper dependent on extremely invasive medical care, hormones, and drugs for your entire, entire adult life. Get to that place because it's not progressive and it's not conservative. It's woke.

And it's highly extreme, it's highly illiberal, and it seeks to destroy the other two. And I would just say, to me, the big, the major political battle ahead of us is not conservative versus liberal. It's really conservative and liberals versus the woke. They don't believe in free speech. They don't believe in equal protection. They don't believe in due process. And that is the significant battle ahead.

We'll be back in a moment with Abigail Schreier and questions from our audience.

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There are a lot of doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists who are writing in both thanking you and also asking questions. Here's one of them. I'm a clinical psychologist who does research on young people. I imagine you know that about 30 organizations, Abigail, just signed a statement declaring that no one should use the term rapid onset gender dysphoria in any context. What can we do to address this statement? I'm worried that the statement will be perceived to have legitimacy.

I'm very worried too. One of the groups that signed on to that, I believe, was the American Academy of Pediatrics. They signed on to it. This is ridiculous. Not that research that done by Dr. Lisa Littman is not only very good research, but there have now been a series of studies that corroborate it.

Okay. And it's taken extremely seriously all over Europe. And look, there's more and more evidence of it all the time. And why are these, why are these organizations doing it? They are trying to silence a hypothesis rather than testing it. We have to be so alarmed by doctors and therapists whose response is not, oh my gosh, let me, let me make sure that the, that the

of social contagion, we need to make sure that it's not true for even one of my patients before I encourage them to transition. No, I'm just going to shut it down. And I really do think it behooves every one of us to do our part to oppose it, to oppose it publicly in whatever way we can. And there are a couple ideas I have for that, but I really think when you see a child in harm's way, when you see something that is a lie and positive,

public, if you are in a place where you have expertise, and remember, I'm just a journalist. I have no expertise. But if you can speak from your own expertise, that is so powerful. And I really recommend everyone who feels they can do so, you know, take a step forward and do your best to speak up. There are so many people who agree with you.

Someone asks, there's a few questions about data. One, do we know how many young women specifically this is affecting? And also, Josh asks, do you know if there's data, Abigail, on the number of children who regret transition later on?

Okay, so children, if they're talking about young kids, I'm not sure when they're asking, Josh is asking about when they transitioned. But right now they're doing studies on detransitioners. You should know that many of them, they have been attacked. They have been attacked by the activists. The activists actually ruined the data for one of Lisa Lippman's studies on purpose on the detransitioners. They won't even allow them to be studied. Right.

But more and more of them are coming forward all the time. We get an idea from looking at social media that this population is large and fast growing, young women especially, but some young men as well who regret that their transition did not feel like it improved their mental health and thought it was a mistake. We're also seeing the Tavistock Clinic in England where they came out with a report showing that there was no mental health improvement for these kids, for these young people who are young adolescents who were put on puberty blockers.

So we're getting some indication that this is certainly not a panacea, sticking them on medical transition. But then there was a first question you asked, which I forgot. Any data about how many young people identify as trans now versus 20 years ago? Is there any data at all? It seems extremely hard to come by. A little easier in...

Right. It's easier in the UK. What I can tell you is that we started out in 2007. We had one gender clinic. Now we have over three, around 300, certainly hundreds of pediatric gender clinics. There's been an explosion. We know that Planned Parenthood now gives it out across the country. We know that this is big business and we know that the number of gender surgeries between 2016 and 2017 quadrupled, I think it was, for women.

biological females. We also know that during pandemic times, and one wonderful researcher on Twitter who I follow, who goes by Emma Zane, that's not her real name, pointed out recently that the number of gender surgeries continued to rise sharply, even when plastic surgery was being canceled across the country during the pandemic. For gender, it rose.

So we're seeing really explosive rates of gender surgery, and we know it's concentrated among this population. We know that because when they survey young people, the number of those who identify as trans or queer continues to rise. It's really quite high. There have been different surveys that have produced different results. But you're talking about gender dysphoria was typically 0.01%.

of males, tiny, tiny numbers, one in 10,000 males. And now you're talking about, you know, over 2% of the high school students or, you know, the number keeps going up from there. But in 2018, it was supposedly 2%. Someone asks,

Would your message maybe be stronger, Abigail, if you reached out more sympathetically to the trans community? Why not continue your reporting and your activism while showing strong support for young people who actually do suffer from gender dysphoria, he asks. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.

It's funny, you know, I certainly interviewed a lot of transgender people in my book and I certainly am constantly in dialogue with transgender people who I know. I guess with the book, I tried to investigate something that wasn't being investigated and I tried to examine, make arguments that weren't being argued.

Um, I, I personally, I don't feel that I need to weigh in on every issue. This is just my, you know, prejudice if it, as it were, or my comfort zone. If, if I feel like there's an issue and, and both sides have been explored or one voice, one side has given full voice, I don't feel like I need to weigh in and say, yeah, I think so too. And, and, and to me, the obvious thing that wasn't being talked about were the very real risks.

The book is quite sympathetic to people with gender dysphoria, but I do think that, no, I don't make arguments on behalf of transition. I think they're really covered elsewhere. Here's a question from a parent.

My daughter was always a tomboy with no apparent gender dysphoria. And then in eighth grade claimed she was trans. I hear some people say that rapid onset gender dysphoria is no different than late onset gender dysphoria. And so it's hard to know what is correct. My gut tells me this isn't who she truly is. There's several questions from parents along those lines. That's a common misconception. So late onset gender dysphoria is really early onset gender dysphoria that persisted.

If you go back and look at the definitions in the DSM-IV and V, for some reason, activists like to say that I relied on DSM-IV. That's not true. But anyway, if you look at even the DSM-V, and I interviewed extensively Ken Zucker, who authored, you know, chaired the committee to author these definitions. Late onset was really just the early onset that continued into adolescence.

So it's not, this is not, and it was always overwhelmingly male-dominated.

And now other, you know, Ray Blanchard is another expert, has a different categorization. He doesn't believe that the late onset, early onset is a good way of getting at what gender dysphoria at all. He thinks it should be broken up into, you know, gay men with a, you know, who, you

what he calls autogynephiles, who have, you know, sexually enjoy dressing as females.

you know, from, from, uh, who are heterosexual, sorry, those are heterosexual men who enjoy sexually enjoy dressing as females, but are still attracted to, to, uh, women, but from gay men who enjoy like drag, you know, what we used to think of as drag Queens, they, the, um, you know, who are gay and just, um, effeminate. Um, so he thinks that's a better way of characterizing it, but either in either sense, um,

Was your daughter, did she get this idea from her peers? Did she get it from social media? Was she encouraged by any of those things? Because I can tell you, I've interviewed a lot of transgender people and they didn't do it because of YouTube. They didn't do it because their friends talked them into it. So if they're getting a lot of celebration at school, if they're getting, if they're throwing themselves into this identity as part of sort of a way to be popular, that's not really what gender dysphoria looks like.

Someone's here from Japan and that person says, I'm just starting to see this ideology enter the fringes of public discourse in Japan. Any ideas about how to sound the alarm before my country and others go the way of the U.S.? Wow, that's such a good question. I love that question because, you know, just let me let me throw another one at you that's connected.

They're all really of a piece. Any advice for someone who wants to speak this sort of truth, but has genuine fear of losing their job. I'm the primary breadwinner in my house and I am in a workplace where I don't feel like I can speak my true feelings without threat of losing my job. So one of the reasons that I was so excited to do this event with you and that I'm so

interested in everything that you write is that you do really exhibit a kind of fearlessness and courage that is incredibly rare. And it's

courage is a topic that I'm incredibly interested in on whether or not it can be cultivated, whether or not it is something that is inborn and personality based, whether disagreeable people tend to be courageous people because they don't really care as much about what other people think. It's a huge topic. Hopefully I'm going to write about it. But practically speaking tonight, um,

I think a lot of people want to tune in because they see you as someone that's exhibiting that kind of fearlessness and they want advice from you about how to apply fearlessness

your character and your bravery, let's say, in their own lives. So let's talk about that. So my own feeling is it depends where you are in life, like what your job is, okay? And what you, so I don't think if you are at a big software company, you know, you necessarily have an obligation to make all of your feelings known about gender, okay? It depends what the context is, okay? But let's start with doctors, right?

Doctors took a Hippocratic oath. If you see things in your hospital, if you see things in your health system that are putting patients in harm's way, you've got a job to do. You have to stand up. You have to say something. You cannot continue to let these kids get hurt.

Okay. You can say things like, that doesn't mean you have to decry the whole system, but you can say things like, you know what, I understand that there's a lot of contention here over whether these treatments are safe. And you can advise patients of that. You could say there's really, there's debate here about whether these treatments are safe. I know that in several countries, they've cut back on them because they're concerned about their safety. You know, it depends what

you know, sort of where you are. But, you know, people come to me all the time with lies that are being told in their profession. And where this is your expertise, I think there's a way of saying, I'm sorry, I don't think that's true. I can't go along with that. That doesn't mean you have to walk out or quit your job, but you can say, you know, you can say to your colleagues, you know, actually, I think there is debate about this. I'm hearing about it all over.

Why is it so hard for people to do that right now? Including people, I'm not talking about, you know, the dentist or the accountant or the lawyer to weigh in on the most controversial matters of the day. I'm talking about our cohort, people like us, people who are paid to search out inconvenient truths, people who are paid to be reporters, people who are shared to, who are paid to

basically to exercise their freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. You mentioned in the beginning of this conversation, Abigail, that you went to every investigative reporter you knew to write about this subject and not a single one of them would bite. What is going on with this epidemic of self-censorship? They are living under the false idea that if they just stay quiet, they're going to get through. This is wrong. A woman called me yesterday, a very prominent journalist, and she said,

very liberal, who said, and I've heard this so many times before, she's typically submitted so often to places, you know, to the top publications. And all of a sudden she's having trouble getting published. And her attitude was kind of like, but I'm so reasonable. I'm so nuanced. I'm not a conservative. Right.

And I just, I tried to say to her, look, these public, it's like the walking dead of American media, right? These, they don't exist anymore. A New York Times with a gender editor that looks at every, every, you know, every section of the paper to see if it meets the

tweets, you know, woke ideology, that's not really a newspaper. It's not a newspaper the way we think of one. So I just want to say that these institutions, they're already gone. They're already dead. And if you can sort of free yourself from thinking that if you just stay quiet, you can get your kid into Harvard, well, you may, but it's not Harvard anymore exactly because it's got a whole different program now.

And the sooner you realize that, look, I got, when you get told by people who sent their kids to the top universities, that their daughter went off to Princeton, Harvard, you name it, and she ended up without her breasts. When you've heard them sob to you on the phone, somehow, you know, currying favor with Harvard and Princeton is just not so important anymore. Right.

And I would just say that the more people are aware that this is not, you know, these institutions aren't what they were and they're not coming back. So as someone who is the product of those institutions and as someone who, or many of them, many of the best of them, and someone who has amazing children yourself,

How are you thinking about raising them in a world where nine-year-olds have smartphones and in a, you know, let's face it, a culture, both in LA, where those names that you just rattled off still carry a lot of social capital. What are the messages that you are sending them as a parent and how are you sort of

let's say reorienting your own choices and your own life to address what I largely agree with about institutional capture and the new reality that we're living in. So funny. You know, let me just say that the parents whose daughters got trapped in this are some of the best parents I've ever, they're far better than I am. They're more patient. I mean, these were amazing parents. I do not pretend to be a perfect parent, but I'll tell you something from my own experience.

I'll tell you one of the, what I think has been sort of really meaningful to my kids in a weird way. My kids, one of my kids says to me all the time, Ema, why don't you have a blue check mark? Everyone has a blue check mark. No followers have blue check marks. Why don't you, they won't give you one. And I always say to them, you know what? It's not important.

In life, people are going to deny you a blue checkmark somehow, and it may not be fair. And you still got to do what's right. And if I can leave my kids with anything, I kind of want them to have that. They have to know that if someone denies them a blue checkmark, they're going to be just fine.

So Abigail, in the essay that you wrote for my newsletter a little while ago that was called The Books Are Already Burning, you wrote of your inbox, the first hundred or so silent supporter emails meant the most to me. You wrote of people who were sort of quiet, dissident fans of yours. They made me feel less crazy and less alone. But the inescapable reality is that defeating this ideology will take courage. And courage is not something that can happen in private.

Courage requires each one of us to speak up publicly for what we believe in, even when or especially when it carries costs.

I want to give you the last word here about the stakes of the moment that we're in. I'm sorry about my dog. And what you think each one of us can do in our own lives to take on the sort of not just political urgency of this moment, not just cultural urgency of this moment, but I would even say the moral urgency of this moment. You know, sometimes people say to me, well, you know, I'm not financially independent or I'm not financially, you know, in a place where I'm secure enough to do this.

And to those people who think that there's a number that you hit, I mean, what is the number in the bank account where you will be willing to live an authentic life, where you can look yourself in the mirror and say, I lived with integrity? I mean, what is the world that you want to hand to your children? It can't be a world where they are taught that parroting what other people will approve of is the way to get by.

That's such a hollow existence and it is the world we're prepping the kids for. And I think it's a giant mistake.

So wherever you are, whatever you do, do what you can to stand up and speak the truth. I'm not saying get fired. I'm not saying doing anything reckless. But you can say, you know, I've had, you know, they had, there's so many instances at this point where someone told me, you know, I really didn't feel comfortable, you know, doing this or saying this. Everything you can do matters to push back on the ideology and say, sorry, I can't go along with that.

Well, Abigail Schreier is a woman who doesn't go along with the crowd, who thinks for herself and who is doing absolutely incredible work. Abigail, tell everyone again, the name of your book, tell them the name of your sub stack and tell them the best way to follow you. Okay.

Okay. The name of my book is Irreversible Damage. The name of my sub stack is, you can find me at abigaleschreier.substack.com. It's called The Truth Fairy. And the best way to follow me is on Twitter at abigaleschreier. Thank you so much for listening. If you have a tip or a guest recommendation, as usual, please drop us a line at honestlypod.com. We'd love to hear from you and you're sending us lots of great ideas. See you soon.