Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbY-g9hnL14
Dutch Subtitles Added
In dit interview wordt John vergezeld door auteur en journalist Helen Joyce om de recente Cass-recensie te bespreken en de onthullingen daarin dat de medische behandeling van kinderen met genderverwarring op ‘wankele fundamenten’ berust.
John en Helen praten over de geschiedenis van transgenderisme, waar het vandaan komt en waar het naartoe gaat. Helen onderzoekt de demografie die wordt beïnvloed door de transgenderideologie, namelijk het grote aantal kinderen dat eraan ten prooi valt, en de worstelingen waarmee hun ouders worden geconfronteerd in hun pogingen hen te helpen.
Helen legt de verraderlijke impact van deze ideologie op de instellingen uit, inclusief de gevolgen van het Tavistock-schandaal in Groot-Brittannië.
Helen Joyce was redacteur Groot-Brittannië bij The Economist, waar ze ruim vijftien jaar werkte
sloot zich als directeur aan bij de genderkritische campagnegroep Sex Matters. Zij is de auteur van Trans:
Wanneer ideologie de realiteit ontmoet.
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00:00 Inleiding
01:45 De geschiedenis van transgenderisme
09:02 Transgenderisme in het Westen
13:39 De Tavistock-kliniek
24:04 Transgenderisme en kinderen
29:35 De kinderen van de Tavistock-kliniek
34:01 De Cass-recensie
39:56 Suïcidaliteit bij transgenders
45:27 De medische industrie als geheel
48:26 Ondersteunen ouders dit?
53:13 Institutionele capture door transactivisten
57:55 Autogynefilie
01:02:30 Perspectief van de overheid
01:09:20 Advies voor ouders
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Children who are gender distressed are, sadly, more suicidal and a bit more likely to kill themselves. But the 2 things you need to know are, 1, it’s really not a high risk. It’s tiny numbers, but of course, every child’s suicide is a horrendous tragedy. But 2, these children have many other sources of distress. Eating disorder, childhood sex abuse, family trauma, autistic spectrum disorder, cutting. So when you compare the children in gender clinics with children who have similar men other mental distress, all that excess vanishes, all the excess suicidality. The sheer viciousness of telling parents and teachers, if you don’t affirm a lie in this child, the child will kill themselves, when there was no evidence for that, when it was false. It’s downright wicked is what it is. My guest today, Helen Joyce, was Britain editor at the famous Economist, where she worked for over 15 years before she joined the gender critical campaign group Sex Matters as a director. She’s the author of Trans When Ideology Meets Reality, and she joins me today to discuss the widely publicized Cass review in Great Britain into children and gender identity as well as transgender ideology in general. Helen, thank you so very much for joining us. You’re, of course, in your native land, and it’s in the morning. I’m in Western Australia, Australia, and it’s mid afternoon. But it’s really good of you to give us some time on something as important as what we’re going to talk about. Oh, thank you for having me on. So can we begin? Can you give us a summary of of of the background and the history of this thing we’re calling transgenderism? I think a lot of us are probably still a bit confused. What precisely is it? Where did it come from? Oh my god. It’s such a big question, John, and that’s one of the reasons people are so confused. What people mean by it has changed very fast over recent time, not like just a 100 years ago, but even in the last 10 years. And different people mean different things. I would say that most people have a sort of a superficial understanding, which is something like this. They think, oh, very occasionally, people are born in the wrong body, or they have some medical, or psychological condition that makes them deeply, deeply distressed at being the sex they are. Doctors are able to diagnose that. They can offer a treatment, which is pretty good. They know who to choose. They give that person that treatment, and then all that is left for the rest of us to do is to accept those people. And that was kind of the paradigm 50, 60, 70 years ago, except that the treatments weren’t ever anything as good as people think they are. Like, it was called sex change, but you can’t actually change people’s sex. All you can do is do a very rough approximation that’s not very functional. But now it doesn’t mean that anymore are men, women, male, female, boy, girl, according to some are men, women, male, female, boy, girl, according to some sort of innate feeling or identity. And that’s something we’re born with. It’s not something that’s necessarily related to our bodies, and only we can say whether we really are a boy or a girl. So you’re meant not to know that I’m a woman until I tell you so. And then what that means is it’s a theory about absolutely everybody. It means that you teach children that biological sex is some version of not real or, at least not important. You tell them that they’ll know whether they’re a boy or a girl. How you’re meant to know that, given that you only have access to your own experiences, is never made clear. But what quickly happens is people start pointing to stereotypes of behaviour and preferences for clothes and such like, and say that people who are girly are therefore girls, even if they’re actually boys. And then they tell us that, you know, this is the most important thing about you and that somehow you have to align your body to this gender identity. And that last bit’s not very clear because if your gender identity isn’t the same as your sex, then why would you need to align it? So So it’s all quite confusing, and it’s quite fast changing and not very, easy to comprehend. And a part of the problem is that if you try and ask any questions about it, the questions themselves are meant to be bigoted. You’re meant to just accept what people tell you. So I don’t blame anybody for finding this confusing. I almost think you’re meant to find it confusing. You’re not meant to be thinking or asking questions. You’re meant to be just accepting and going along with it. Does that help? I think it does help. I think a lot of people would say we’ve always known that there are some kids who have genuine and deep seated issues, and we’re inclined, I think, to be very sympathetic. What I think has been breathtaking, though, for a lot of people is the explosion in the numbers of children who are presenting, with doubt about their own being born in the wrong body, so to speak. And in particular, the work that suggests I have to be frank about this. I guess I’m asking you whether it’s true. That a lot of this has to be seen surely as a social contagion because if you take the United States, for example, overwhelmingly, the kids who are presenting are from quite narrow backgrounds. They’re from middle and high income white families, which, again, points clearly to a social contagion. So the explosion in the numbers, what does it tell us? Because I think that’s a stunning part of all of this for us. Yeah. I mean, I’d start with that, you know, there have always been kids with deep seated issues thing. That’s kind of true and kind of not true at the same time. It is always true that distress is always with us, mental distress is always with us, but the form that it takes very much depends on the culture that you’re in, the stories that culture tells to itself about what distress means. You know, there are ailments, historical ailments, like hysteria or vicarious menstruation that we just don’t see anymore because they’re not stories we tell to each other anymore. And PTSD is a relatively recent sort of almost invention. The distress was experienced differently at different times. We don’t talk about, what was it they called it, after this the First World War, the the shock. I’ve forgotten the word for it. Shell shock. Exactly. We don’t talk about shell shock at all anymore. So shell shock was how the soldiers coming back from the First World War expressed their distress. Every now and then it’s true. A child or an adult might sort of settle on the idea that they were in the wrong body or they were meant to be the opposite sex as their way of expressing their distress. But it’s very rare that these ideas pop up unseeded by a culture. So something happened over the last century or so, really gaining pace in the last decade, that large numbers of people both felt a distress that could be interpreted as being born in the wrong body and decided that that’s how they would interpret that distress. So it didn’t really happen very often 50 years ago. It almost never happened in children. And when it did, it was almost exclusively very effeminate little boys. I mean, some boys are born very I hate the word effeminate, but we all know what I mean. And those boys are much, much more likely than other boys to grow up gay. And every homophobe knows that. Every dad who wants to toughen up his son because he doesn’t want a gay son knows that. And those boys, those sweet little boys who are just doing what comes naturally to them, are very prone to getting bullied, shamed, told that they must act differently. And that can create this gender distress because at some point that boy thinks to himself, everything would be much easier if I was a girl. I was meant to be a girl. I must be a girl stuck in a boy’s body. So that was the only cases among children that clinicians really ever saw. And they certainly, certainly never thought thought of doing anything physical for that boy or telling him that he really was a girl. And then that changed over the last 20 years, really since well, in the 19 nineties, some Dutch clinicians started thinking about treating those boys as if they were really girls. I’m sure we’ll get to the story of puberty blockers in a bit. And it got picked up in America just short of 20 years ago. And then it started to be given without any safeguards to quite a large number of people. And then in the 2010s, girls, teenage girls, started to turn up at the clinic. And they just hadn’t been seen by gender clinicians before. There literally wasn’t a single academic paper on gender distress in teenage girls before about 2010. Not one. Not one. So the clinic clinics are now seeing these girls, and, they’re giving them a treatment pathway that was created for effeminate little boys, who, by the way, should never have been treated anyway in that way. But it was just being given to them. So something happened in the culture is the short answer to why we’re seeing it now. And we can maybe unpick bits of that, like what’s happening in schools online with pornography and so on. But, yeah, there’s a lot of elements to it. Do you think that, you can see different patterns in different countries? Again, you know, this seems to be very much a western, phenomenon, if not even more pronounced in the English speaking part of the western. You got it in 1. You got it in 1. It’s a it’s an American contagion that went global as as American things do tend to. Like, when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, especially culturally, funnily. We tend to think about politics or money or business or power, you know, hard power. But culturally, America is more dominant than any country has ever been in the history of humanity. Like, it leaves the Roman Empire in the dust in terms of its influence globally. And that influence is not a it’s not a deliberate influence. It’s not orchestrated by anyone. It’s just that that’s where the big media companies are. It’s where the big tech companies are. You know, obviously, it’s the leader of the Western world in terms of things like military action. All the global multinational companies, you know, they tend to have their headquarters in America. Products are designed to suit Americans. And there’s a great book that was, written some years ago about the way that, the American mindset has gone global. It’s called Crazy Like Us, the Globalization of the American Psyche, and it traces American ways of thinking. For example, PTSD, which is something that came after the Vietnam War. And how that got exported, and it got exported by NGOs, so they would turn up in countries like Sri Lanka after the civil war. Obviously, people who were distressed and traumatized, and they would interpret that through the American lens of PTSD. And, you know, you tell people that their stress fits a certain pattern, and their distress tends to fit a certain pattern. And so people start to display the symptoms specifically of PTSD. So that’s what we’re seeing. And if you think then that it’s an American, idea, this this conception of what gender, man, woman mean is as American as the concept of race that America is currently exporting as well, which very much depends on America’s own racial history and doesn’t translate necessarily very well to other countries, then you see that it is most pronounced in the countries that are culturally and linguistically closest to America. So it’s going to hit the English speaking countries harder and earlier, those that have very close ties with America and really the UK, for example, obviously, your own country too, Canada. And in some ways, some of those countries have fewer safeguards against us because another thing about America is it’s very polarized. So this isn’t just an American Contagion. It’s a Left wing American Contagion. It comes out of universities, liberal cities, liberal coastal cities, industries like media publishing, journalism, Whereas, you know, the Republican states don’t never bought into it in the same way and in fact are fighting back hard. But then you look at a country like Canada that doesn’t have that same counterweight, and it’s just taken over Canada. So it’s gone much further in Canada, in fact, even than in the US because there’s no local opposition to stand up against it. So, yeah, I mean, it’s it’s about 6 or 7 years, I think, now since I went to, Asia for a reporting trip for The Economist when I was the finance editor. I was writing about something completely different, namely, the digitization of personal banking. So I was going to look at places where everyone was doing everything on their phone already, which, of course, we all are now, but we weren’t then. And so I visited Shanghai, Seoul, and Singapore. And in each place, I met our local correspondents and our local office people. And in Shanghai, there are foreign correspondents who are people who come from abroad, and then there are some local office staff who are hired. And we went out for dinner. I was telling them about this side thing that I was doing that I was researching, because I was starting to think about my book, and the expressions on the Chinese women’s faces as I was trying to explain to them that there was anybody in the world who seriously thought that a little boy could really be a little girl because he said he was a little girl. They had never heard anything as insane in their lives. They thought I was doing an elaborate joke. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? And and thanks for that global perspective. That’s really valuable. And I think, our listeners will be find that strangely reassuring, you know, that the whole world doesn’t go mad. Oh, but it’s getting there. That export American culture that, you talk about. Yeah. Well, but, but but Britain has moved now quite extraordinarily, particularly following, some of the legal arguments that have emerged from people who have transitioned in the past and regretted it. And we’ve seen the controversial and well known, even here in this country, Australia, Tavistock gender clinic actually shut down as I understand it. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of that clinic and what’s happened amongst people who have transited it and then regretted it? Because I understand that’s been a really significant issue and why the Brits have been prepared to have a long, hard look at what’s going on. Yeah. So it’s you won’t know that if you live abroad, but the weird thing about the Tavistock Clinic is it’s part of a much larger, clinic, which is very psycho and analytical. So if you know in this country about treatment for mental distress, what you’ll know about the Tavistock is is where you turn up to do sort of Freudian and Jungian analysis and sit on a coach a couch for 10 years. You know? I exaggerate with the 10 years. Unmedicalized place you could possibly go to talk about any sort of mental issue. But some decades ago, talk about any sort of mental issue. But some decades ago, they set up a tiny clinic to see children. So with very, very, very rare conditions, it’s common to have, just one, you know, one center that takes it from a very large area because, otherwise, the people working there won’t get enough practice to be good. And this was the one and only clinic for the whole of England, and actually Wales as well. And it saw, you know, a couple of dozen kids a year in the first few years. All boys or pretty much all boys, all of them very little. And these are the kids who from age 3 or 4 are saying things like, I want to cut my penis off. God made a mistake with me. You know, I’m meant to be a girl, and so on. And it treated them, you know, with sort of what’s now called watchful waiting. Just support them, support the families to not get freaked out by this. Just kind of help them to not hate themselves, bring them towards puberty, and then puberty tends to resolve the issues. We know that. We’ve known that for decades that if you just support kids who think this when they’re very little, puberty works it out for them. That’s the common sense. At some point. Sorry. Go on, John. That’s the sort of common sense position. Give it some time. A lot of these things work itself out. And yet there’s been fierce pushback from the usual suspects, the activists. Fierce pushback. Yeah. I I mean, I’ll get I’ll get to that because there is a reason. It’s not out of nowhere. But But that was what was being done when that clinic was working properly. And then activists got to it and said that, you know, look. Abroad in America, they’re giving children puberty blockers. And they understand that these children are born in the wrong body and so on. And they pushed, and the clinic folded. And we know that, really, from the data that’s come out since. And it became a quite activist clinic, and from 2011 and then speeding up in 2014. Like but this time, the waiting lists were quite big because you can’t see clinics without seeing what’s happening in schools and online. Like, you know, there’s a there’s a increasing numbers coming to the clinics. They can’t operate properly that way. So the kids turn up after years on the waiting list, massively distressed, completely fixated on the drugs that they’re going to get, thinking those are gonna fix their problems. You can’t actually talk to them sensibly anymore. And they, they did a very poor job. No, you know, no standards, no comparison, no, like, level setting between different clinicians, the things that you do in a careful clinical setting. Their record keeping was terrible. And then Kira Bell, a young woman who had been quite convinced that she was meant to be a boy. She’s lesbian or bisexual, and she’s quite masculine in her interests and presentation, and that kind of fooled her into thinking she was meant to be a boy. She went there. She aged out. She was over 16 by the time she got off the waiting list, but she ended up having a mastectomy and taking testosterone and quite quickly realizing it was all a mistake. And she took a court case. And that the the verdict in that was actually overturned, but the evidence in the court case really showed for the first time to the world how poor the practice was in the Tavistock and how poor the record keeping was. They couldn’t even answer sensible questions like, how many kids have you seen? What’s happened to them since? How many of them had autistic spectrum disorders? How many had other mental conditions? They just didn’t know the answers to these things. They were operating in a most amateurish way. I hate And then, you know, then a a a long, I always try very hard to interrupt. I I really do. So I feel a very rude interrupting, and apologies to listening. Sorry. I I tend to monologue. I’m sorry. No. No. No. You don’t. No. No. No. I just want to draw something out there. What sort of people what possesses adult people to take children on that sort of a journey and not check out carefully how the patient was doing afterwards and what it all meant. What sort of space do you have to be in if you are preserved you know, you’re you’re talking about people who have prescribed very powerful drugs. You’re talking about people who have done major operations. Surely, you follow through. What sort of people don’t think they have a responsibility to check through how their patients are doing afterwards? So there’s 2 bits to that. One is that, in met modern medicine, a lot of the time, it you’re going to get your care from several people because it’s all become so specialized. And that’s more true in gender medicine than in many things. So the people in the Tavistock never prescribe anything and never do any operations. All they do is refer. So they refer somebody to an endocrinologist, and there’s a there’s a concept called the chain of trust in medicine that all the specialists believe all the other specialists are doing their job properly. So if you’re an endocrinologist and somebody comes in and they’ve got the piece of paper from the gender doctor saying, this person has gender dysphoria, which is a fancy word for distress, you know, give them testosterone or give them estrogen, You think they’ve done their job, and your job is just to check that they don’t have some, counterindication contraindication, like, you know, high blood pressure or diabetes or something. So you then give the child hormones, and then the child is referred on for surgery perhaps at age 18. In this country, you can’t get it below age 18. And that person thinks the chain of trust holds too, and they may remove that child’s genitals or a woman’s breasts or whatever because they think other people have done their job. But at the beginning of the chain, the person who says this child has gender dysphoria, they’re not cutting anything off or giving any powerful drugs. They’re not prescribing or operating. So I think it’s that diffuse responsibility. You know, if everybody’s responsible, nobody’s responsible. Like nobody did the terrible thing and yet the child ended up a sterile adult. And that’s one part of the answer, but the other part of the answer is these people believed they were doing the right thing. Human beings are very prone to getting an idea in their head and thinking it’s so right that it will be a waste of time to check. And the way you check-in medicine is you have to do studies that have got control groups, like people you don’t give the treatment to, and you compare the 2. And doctors are dreadfully prone, historically speaking, to thinking, but I’m sure this is the right treatment. And if I withhold it from the control group, that’s very unethical. And we train medical statisticians to understand that it’s not unethical, and we give them lots and lots of examples of in the past treatments that got rolled out, that people just assumed were the right thing, and they thought people looked like they were getting better afterwards. And then finally, someone did a rigorous study. And it turns out that they weren’t getting better, that it was the placebo effect or just that this is the sort of thing you get better from over time. And in fact, they’ve been harming their patients with this. So they haven’t done that because they think they’re right. And if I may just say one more thing about why they think they’re right. So if we go back decades, it wasn’t just little boys who turned up at clinics. In fact, they were just a tiny number of those who turned up at clinics. Clinics were basically for adults. It was adult men mostly, some women, but mostly men. And some of those men were, gay men who had come to the conclusion that they were just meant to be women, that they were so womanly that they’d be happier if they were women. But some of them were heterosexual men who were fixated on the idea of being a woman for erotic reasons. So these are men who would be erotic cross dressers, which is a fairly common minority sexual male interest, who had become fixated on it and wanted to live full time as a woman. And for those men, like convincing people that what they have is something serious and that they must be helped. Look, I don’t mock or dislike anybody because they have a fetish or an unusual sexual interest. I don’t wanna know about it, but I don’t think they’re bad people. But they feel shame, and a lot of people do shame them about it. So they need a narrative that isn’t, I’m an erotic cross cross dresser who can’t just keep it to the bedroom at weekends anymore. And that narrative is, I was born this way. They got that narrative from the gay rights movement. And I mean, the fact is that a lot of gay people are born that way. We know that’s a fact. But this is something different. And so if they’re born that way, they need there to be children who are that way. And so those people are the main constituency originally for the idea that there are children who are born in the wrong body or born actually being girls when they look like they’re boys, or that sex can be assigned at birth. And they want that to be true because it’s they want it to be true for themselves, and because that’s the narrative they want to present to the world. I don’t think it’s that cynical. Like, I’m saying it like they’re doing it deliberately. But I think it’s a very, very deep rooted psychological desire to be propped up by those children’s stories. And that, to my mind, is how all of this got off the ground, that there are people who desperately want it to be true, clinicians who want to be saviours, and then a diffuse responsibility, which means that nobody takes responsibility. And, you know, there are medical scandals are common. They happen really with repeated and tragic frequency. And when we look back at them, we always say, let’s learn lessons. But when you look back, there’ll be some particularities, like that story about adults wanting the children to be, treated this way. But there are just also similarities. You know, doctors do get a savior complex. Medicine is complex. People do palm off responsibility on each other. And then finally, people don’t want to admit that they’ve got it wrong because it’s too painful. Like imagine you being the one who did those things. I do know a few of the whistleblower clinicians from the Tavistock, and there are people who practiced in this way before they realized that what they were doing was wrong. And they struggle mightily with it because they know they did some of their patients harm and that’s not what they went into their job for. So for some people who’ve gone further down that road, they can never admit it. It’s too painful to realize what they have done and to admit it to themselves, so they will never change their minds. Couple of things come out of that. One is that I think in the pub, the pub test as we call it in Australia, people would say, well, it’s one thing for an adult person who’s struggled with these sorts of issues for a long time to take what amounts to a decision by an adult as an adult to pursue a certain course of action. It’s vastly different matter when where where children are involved. And as I understand it, Kira Bell’s, court cases did establish, did they did it not, that, there was up to a certain age, children were not ready to make those sorts of decisions for themselves. So that was a step 1, as I understand it? Well, that was in the first hearing, but that was actually overturned in the high court, and it was decided by a separate hearing that parents could consent for them, which is the usual arrangement for under 16s. So, yeah, I mean, really the value of Keira Bell’s hearing was what came out in it. And the bravery that she had and the way that she became a symbol of this poor treatment. But in fact, that judgment did not stand. So in one state here, Victoria, what are called, so called anti conversion laws actually center on this very issue. And parents and psychologists and so forth can literally literally face charges, even go to jail if they were to, discard or use anything other than the total affirmation route, and and suggest waiting, which seems to me to be so dangerous and so out of step. And it plays into the 2nd pin issue you’ve just raised. I I mean, I feel we’re all human. I feel very sorry for those who look back that you’ve just mentioned and think, how did I get involved in that? Isn’t that a great warning to to to those who are still hell bent on the affirmation model? Look out. The warning signs are there if you get a look. You need to think very carefully about going down this road. Yeah. I mean, I I think it’s the sunk cost thing. You’ve got into it. You’ve done this thing, and now you need to find arguments. Human beings are terribly good at rationalizing after the fact. You need to find arguments for why you did the right thing. So there’s all these talking points, like, because I spend my life working on this, I know all the talking points by now. And one of them is that regret after transgender surgery is less than regret after knee hole surgery on your keyhole surgery on your knee. They’ll say it’s less than 1%. But I used to work as a statistician. My degree is is in maths and stats, and I did a PhD in mathematics. And then I worked for the Royal Statistical Society editing their magazine for some years. So while I wasn’t somebody who did statistical studies, I was someone who used to have to explain them and write them up. And the first question you should always ask yourself about data is how do they know? Like, I know because it doesn’t take long to find out that None of the clinics anywhere in the world are following up their patients. So how could they know what the regression is? No. They don’t know. And then they they put out these studies. And when you look at the studies, first all, they’re just done online. They just anyone who wants can fill it in online. So straight away, that’s rubbish because you haven’t got any sort of a representative sample. You’ve got a biased sample. Doesn’t matter how large the numbers are. In that case, it could be a 1000000 people. If it’s biased, it makes no difference. It’s still a bad study. You know, they are excluding, for example, one of the big studies that’s often cited, very poor study, to say that there’s very little regret, excludes detransitioners. You have to currently identify as trans to be eligible to fill it in. So you’re like, oh, you know, you can fill it in as many times as you like. They aren’t checking people’s names. You can fill it in from abroad. Like, it’s absolute garbage, and yet this is the sort of thing they cite. So I would offer this to your listeners as a general point and not just about this one. Whenever somebody tells you that they know a numerical answer to something, ask how could they know that? Because sometimes it’s clear immediately that they simply can’t know it, that there’s just no way of finding out, for example, how many people identify as trans. Like, how do we know that? Who is asking that? It’s been put on a census question in Canada and the u UK. Are the questions well designed? Do people know what they mean? In the answer in the UK, is absolutely they did not know what it meant. The the pattern of answers to whether you’re trans turned out that Muslim people who don’t speak English are some of the most highly likely to identify as trans, which is just so implausible, and it’s so obviously about a language issue. Yeah. So that’s just one example. Like, they don’t know. Why do they not care about it? I think, you know, if you’re a detrans, you are the person personification of the thing they say isn’t possible, which is that you thought you knew yourself, but you didn’t. Like, they say everybody knows themselves. Everyone has a gender identity. Only the person themselves can know their gender identity. A detrans person is someone who is mistaken, and that suggests that anybody could be mistaken. So they’re a devastating blow to the heart of the foundation, like absolutely central to the whole way of thinking. And if you allow yourself to entertain doubt on that, you could doubt anything. So they’re treated like apostates, actually. They’re treated worse than I am, and I’m treated pretty badly. So I’m just a heretic, but they’re apostates. And every totalizing religion, and I do regard this as a godless neo religion, hates apostates more than anyone. And they are shunned. They are treated as if they’d left the Mormons or, you know, the 7th day Adventists or whichever one of the American churches that is that really goes after Scientologists. That’s what I’m thinking of. They’re treated like they’ve left Scientology, which is not well. Just a matter of interest, Tavistock, we know about the Kira Bill case. But we have a feel for how many children, you know, went through, were treated, and how many what proportion of those, have now, like Kira Bill, indicated some concern over not being wisely counseled. What do the numbers look like? We should know the answer to that, and it should have come out with Hilary Cass’ report last week. So we know that about 9,000 kids went through the Tavistock in the time periods that we’re interested in. And we think that about 2,000 of them had some sort of hormonal intervention, which at under 16 is going to be puberty blockers in this country. You don’t get cross sex hormones on the NHS until 16. And when the CAS interim review reported 2 years ago, Sajid Javid, who was the health secretary at the time, passed a little law, statutory instrument, giving permission to the the researchers working with CAS to, access the health the health care records of those people. Because this stupid, stupid thing happens. Your NHS number encodes within it whether you’re male or female. And if you’ve gone through a legal sex change, they change your NHS number. So they weren’t able to link their records without express permission. Anyways, the law was changed. Like, significant effort went into this, political effort. And then CAS contacted all 7 adult gender identity clinics, because a lot of the kids get passed on to them. They age out of the Tavistock and get passed on. And she said, you know, will you work with me? It was an ethical it had gone through ethical approval. It was going to be anonymized. No records would have been given without permission of the of the record holder, and 6 of the 7 clinics refused to give her the data and refused to cooperate. So when a report came out last week, she had to say, we don’t know what happened to those kids because none of the adult only one of the adult gender clinics was willing to work with me. And this has been a big political scandal here in the past week, and that the health current health secretary, Victoria Atkins, gave a speech a few days ago in Westminster in the House of Commons saying that, you know, they will be told to and she’ll be dragging them in to ask them why. And they’ve all agreed that they will now. But you just have to ask yourself, like, what is it that they’re trying to hide? I mean, I think they’re trying to hide even the possibility that they might have done something wrong from themselves. And I also suspect that their practice and their record keeping has been so catastrophically fallen short of what people really have the right to expect from medics. But they’re actually ashamed of it, and they don’t want it to come out. I mean, if you knew that what you were doing was good to high standards and really helped people, you would be looking to do this research yourself. You wouldn’t have waited for Doctor. Kass to do it. So it’s gonna be another couple of years before we get those figures. And in the meantime, puberty blocker prescriptions have basically been entirely halted here, certainly in the NHS, and they’re trying to stop the private prescriptions as well. And cross sex hormones for, under eighteens, because I think they were giving some at 16. If I remember correctly, that’s right. Yes. And they’re even trying to be careful, but 18 to 25 year olds too. But private clinics will step in if they don’t try to squash that too. So a lot of things have been very abruptly, put a they put the brake on it. But, of course, kids have been told for the past decade that this is the solution to their distress. Like, I really feel for these kids. Like, imagine you’ve been sold snake oil and you’ve been on a waiting list for years. And you think that, you know, when you get that snake oil, all your distress is going to magically vanish and you’re going to come out of the ashes like the phoenix rising. And then these nasty, nasty people, these people like me, who are saying that this treatment doesn’t work, snatch it away from you. I don’t have an alternative because I can’t wave my magic wand and make sure that there’s great talk therapy available for all the distressed kids. So these kids are really very distressed now. They think that, you know, they have no alternative. It’s very, very upsetting to see a medical scandal in detail play out in real time. Like all the I’ve read about medical scandals before, but I never thought to myself, what was it like for the families who sent their daughter for a lobotomy, thinking that it was a good treatment, when actually they worked out that lobotomies were a human rights abuse and it destroyed people’s minds. Like how must they have felt for the rest of their lives? But those are the questions that we now need to ask about the people who had been mistreated in the Tavistock and elsewhere because the Tavistock is not unusual. The only thing that’s unusual here is the scrutiny, I have to tell you. I’m sure your clinics are no better. Well, that’s concerning. Now we’ve already started to touch on the CAS, review, doctor CAS. What what finally triggered a proper high quality review? And what do you think it’s, the most important, findings have been just to just to bring us up to speed on? Sure. I think Kiara Bell’s hearing was a huge part of it, but there were sort of steps. There were campaigners who were trying for years to get the news out whatever way they could. Incredibly, the 1st whistleblower at the Tavistock was in 2004. A psychiatric nurse who said you can’t be giving hormones after 4 appointments. And she was forced out. There have been several whistleblowing episodes. The governor of the Tavistock, David Bell, wrote a very critical report because a whistleblower came to him and said, you know, if you raise any doubts about treatment, you’re frozen out. The head of safeguarding, suffered severe detriment in her workplace, Sonya Appleby, for raising safeguarding concerns she won in an employment tribunal. So all these brave people over time chipped away at the idea that this was a black box that you could just put, you know, distressed children into. The clinicians knew what they were doing, and out they’ve come magically the opposite sex. And then finally, the CAS review was commissioned. It was commissioned 4 years ago, which is just a bit short of. 2 years ago, it published an interim report, which is already, look, the evidence doesn’t look strong. And then there the final report came out last week. So what were the important? What were the highlights? Basically, there is no evidence that puberty blockers help with gender distress in children. There’s very little evidence for the use of cross sex hormones in general. There’s obvious it’s obvious obviously true that puberty blockers, which just basically do what they sound like, but they’re they’re basically a chemical cosh. Like, they’re it’s like going directly into menopause in one day. They just cut off a particular whole, set of hormonal interactions in the brain and body. We know that that’s going to be bad for you. Like, because it’s interrupting an extremely important developmental sprint. Like, it can’t be good for you to do that. The question is how long term bad is it for you? And the emerging evidence is it is quite long term bad for you. You know, your brains your brain and your bones won’t recover really. So that’s clear. It’s also clear that if you progress from taking puberty blockers early in puberty to take cross sex hormones, you’ll be sterile. You probably won’t be able to have an orgasm, and you may never discover what your sexuality is because you won’t ever have gone through your natural puberty that tells you who you are as an adult. So all of those things are known. But what Cas said was that the evidence for treating using it treat gender distress wasn’t either one way or the other. But if you think of the bad things on one side, like the sterility, you know, disrupting a very important developmental moment, you need something very big on the other side to justify it. You need that it really does treat this really horrific feeling very, very well. And that’s gone. So now there’s no justification for using puberty blockers. There really isn’t, you know, there’s no promise that it’s going to help, no likelihood that it’s going to help, and it’s very, very risky. So that’s the big one, I think. And then just the total really very poor quality of both the care and the research. And the the systematic review that she commissioned from the University of York looked at a 103, found a 103 relevant papers that fit the criteria. 2 of them were high quality. Now it was 50 something were medium quality. And that’s fine. Look, medium quality can just mean they were a bit small, like, as in not many participants. Lots of studies are medium quality. You combine them, and if you see that they tend to go one way, you actually build up a proper picture of what’s happening. And just short of 50 studies were poor quality, and they were discarded. Because if you include poor quality things, you’re gonna get a bad result. So they looked at the rest, and they didn’t all point the same way or suggest any clear picture. They were all just very different. And what came out at the end was, there’s just no evidence base for this treatment pathway. Like, they’ve been doing it since, 2006 or 7 in America and in quite large numbers globally since. They’ve been doing us, you know, full throttle in the Tavistock since 2014 and they’ve no evidence for it. And just a priori, you would know that interrupting a child’s puberty would be a very significant thing to do. And sterilizing somebody, like sterilizing a child. Again, it’s this diffuse thing. You know, you say to yourself, well, you know, they could come off the puberty blockers and go through their normal puberty, so I’m not sterilizing them. But basically, nobody does. About 98% of people who go on puberty blockers go on to cross sex hormones. And then you think, well, they don’t have to go on to have the surgery. They could still revert. But I mean, at some point, you can’t go through your own puberty anymore. We don’t exactly know when, but we know there’s a window and it closes. So they are sterilizing people and they’re sterilizing people at age 10 or 11 when they start them on the puberty blockers with fairly high certainty. And you would only do that, the only situation I can think of that you would do that in is if the child has a cancer that’s going to kill them. And you refer them for radiotherapy or chemotherapy, knowing it will sterilize them, but it will save their life. So they’re doing a treatment pathway that the thing on the other side of the scales would have to be death. And that is why they say the suicide risk is so high. And that’s the second important thing that Cass said. She said there is we can be sure that gender distress does not need puberty blockers to stop suicide. Puberty blockers are an ineffective treatment, a non effective treatment for suicidality in gender distressed kids. That wasn’t, you know, the evidence is not in yet. That was the evidence is in and that’s a lie. And it’s a lie that the campaigners say all the time. And the reason they say it is because they know they need something really big on this side of the scales when people start looking at what’s on this side of the scales. The, that that has seemed to me to be a horrific aspect of it. So many of us I mean, I include myself in this. I’m not an expert. So when we’re constantly told that to not affirm children in their, in in their condition is to risk that they’ll take their own lives. It’s pretty amazing to discover, as I and I I I just wanna test this, There is precisely no evidence of increased suicide risk at all. There is there is strong evidence that it doesn’t. Right. That’s that’s now that hypothesis can now be discarded. Yeah. So children who are gender distressed are, sadly, more suicidal and a bit more likely to kill themselves. But the 2 things you need to know are, 1, it’s really not a high risk. It’s tiny numbers, but, of course, every child’s suicide is a horrendous tragedy. But 2, these children have many other sources of distress. A child who’s seen at a gender clinic very commonly has some or all of, like a large number of, eating disorder, childhood sex abuse, family trauma, autistic spectrum disorder, cutting, you know, depression, anxiety, OCD, all these conditions. Like, children commonly have several of them. These are known as comorbidities. So So when you compare the children in gender clinics with children who have similar other mental distress, all that excess vanishes, all the excess suicidality, which again is not very high. So it’s the most disgusting bit of moral blackmail I’ve ever seen in my life on any subject, is to tell parents you must do this thing or else your child will kill themselves. I mean, I’m so if I I’m angry about many things in this, and I haven’t allowed myself to feel the anger since I discovered this topic, which was about 2018. Because I can’t, you know, I can’t get up every day and feel this angry when there’s work to be done. And I have to focus on the work and the future and be willing to accept people changing their minds when I’m angry with them forever having got it wrong in the first place. But since the Cass review came out last week, I have been so angry because I’ve allowed myself to feel the anger. Like the sheer viciousness of telling parents and teachers, if you don’t affirm a lie in this child, the child will kill themselves, when there was no evidence for that, when it was false. It’s downright wicked is what it is. And at the same time, probably neither the parents nor the children had the risk of sterility explained to them if you if you No. Because I mean, we know that. That came out in the in the in the Kira Bell hearing. So at the first hearing, they called the endocrinologist who headed the service where they would refer the children for their puberty blockers. And a and the the the lawyer who was representing that endocrinologist was asked what were the youngest kids they had prescribed puberty blockers to. And they’re giving puberty blockers to 3 10 year old girls. And at 10, you know, that’s definitely early enough that if the child starts puberty blockers and then go straight on to testosterone, that child will be sterile. Absolutely, definitely sterile. Like, no possibility of like, it’s I’m not talking about infertility. I was infertile. I went to a fertility clinic and had children by IVF with my husband. This is sterility. There is no fertility to save Because your gonads, your, your testicles or your ovaries, they mature in in puberty. That’s when they become capable of producing, you know, things that turn into babies. So these girls, if they go on that pathway, they will be sterile. No doubt. And also, testosterone is very bad for a woman’s reproductive organs. It’s very bad for her uterus and her vagina. It thins the walls of them, causes pain, bleeding, and atrophy. So these girls are being put on a pathway that means they’re going to have to have a hysterectomy young, like before they’re 20. And the endocrinologist was asked where they counselled about this. And you ask yourself, like, how could you possibly, possibly explain any of this to a 10 year old? 10 year olds tend to say stupid things like, oh, I don’t want to be a mother anyway, but anyway, if I change my mind, I’ll just adopt. Like how many 10 year olds know what it’s like to adopt? Like we looked into adoption. This is not an easy path and you don’t do it for you, you do it for the child. So they didn’t. And the excuse they gave was that it was possible that the girls could come off the puberty blockers at age 14 for 6 months or so, allow their ovaries to mature enough that they could go through a cycle or 2 of IVF and collect and freeze the eggs. I mean, again, I’ve done fertility treatment. This is just I mean, it’s it’s a fiction. Like it’s a dystopian fiction. Nobody is going to do that. You’ve got a child who thinks she’s a boy. Nobody is going to let themselves develop enough. It’s a miserable experience getting eggs harvested. We don’t know how many frozen eggs ever, thaw and produce babies. But anyway, she’s going to have to have her uterus taken out. Who’s going to have the baby for her? Like, the whole thing is just fantasy. Anyway, that was the fantasy that they didn’t even bother informing the 10 year olds about. So that’s the level of treatment. But this I I again, I promise you this is not unusual. This is not that the Tavistock is a rogue clinic. This is happening all over the English speaking world. I would pretty much guarantee in any or most clinics that are seeing minors, it’s that level of superficial, non informing, pretending that they’ve informed, pretending that they’re not doing something because in the future somebody else might do something different. It’s just a scandal, all of it. The CAS report said that even GPs have testified that they’ve been put under pressure to administer puberty blockers because otherwise children would commit suicide. GPs were being pressured. Who was responsible? Was. Everybody. I I mean, that lie is everywhere. It’s the thing the single thing I hear the most when I try to sort things out for individuals, because people get in touch with me sometimes, is, oh, well, we had to do it because she cut herself otherwise. So I’m thinking of them, people who live near me, and they asked me for some advice because they discovered that their daughter had been calling herself a boy at school for, I think, 18 months at that point, and everyone had been instructed to go along with it, teachers and students, and they had been instructed not to let the parents know. So to revert to the calling the girl the girl and by her original name, if the parents were around. And someone had screwed up, and they had seen the boy name and the boy pronouns. And so they had followed up. And they were devastated. Like their daughter was being a daughter at home and a boy in school. And, they they asked the school, like, how could you do this? And the school said, we had to because she’d kill herself otherwise. It was child safeguarding. And you know, everything about this is not just so awful to that family and that girl and those parents, but it’s just such nonsense. Like if you think of a child who’s genuinely a suicide risk, the first thing you’d have to do is tell the parents. Because where is the child going to do it? At home. And also, that’s not how you treat suicidal risk. Tragically people do disclose to people in authority figures, like teachers, that they’re feeling suicidal. And there’s a protocol. You don’t take it upon yourself to decide what next to do. And you certainly don’t say, Oh, well then you can have whatever you want. Like a friend of mine who worked in American ER for a while during the opioid crisis, she said people would come in who were addicted to opioids and they would tell lies like, you know, I’m on holiday and I forgot my prescription. I just need 2 weeks, da da da. And they learned to spot them. And they wouldn’t give them those prescriptions. And then that person might threaten to kill themselves. And she said to me, and we did not say, okay, here are your opioids. They said, oh, now I have to refer you for a psych evaluation. That’s what the teachers should have said if they seriously thought this child was suicidal. Oh, gosh. We need to tell your parents. We need to tell your GP. You need an urgent psych evaluation. You know, you need help from Not, alright, then you’re really a boy. You know, once people get this central idea wrong that a girl could really be a boy, it breaks everything. It breaks safeguarding. It breaks logic. It breaks common sense. It it breaks medicine. It breaks education. It breaks government. It breaks institutions. And all of them start acting in ways that are antithetical to the way they’re supposed to act. Like, these teachers were harming this girl. They didn’t realize that, but they were doing anti safeguarding things in the name of safeguarding. Astonishingly, parents appeared from time to time to be co opted into this. I think you’ve talked about this as well, that that sometimes parents themselves become powerful activists pursuing the Yeah. I mean sometimes it starts with the parent, I’m sorry to say. I mean, you you’ll sometimes see stories in the press about a 2 or 3 or 4 year old boy who, you know, the mother will say, you know, I knew he was a girl. I always wanted a girl. And, you know, and you’re just like, oh, you know, that that that’s like the famous thing about the vegan cash. Like, there’s no such thing as a vegan cash. You know, that’s the owner. Like, when very tiny children get this idea into their head, it’s not them. And I mean, I won’t even speculate as to why they do it, but I’ll just point out that they get a lot of kudos for it and a lot of coverage and a lot of praise. But that’s, you know, that’s extreme, and I don’t think it’s mostly that. I think the problem is if you’re a parent and your child comes to you and says, I’m really a boy or I’m really a girl, you can’t sit on the fence for very long. There’s a choice to be made. And whichever choice you make, you have to accept some risk of regret in your mind, and you will try to choke that down. So if you decide, looking around, you know, unfortunately, you land on the suicide statistics, you go to your GP thinking your GP will help you, but your GP just tells you, oh, you know, I’ll refer to the Tavistock. The waiting list is 4 years. You know, you’re very much on your own, and there’s so much disinformation pumped out by the activist groups in particular that you’re quite likely to get the wrong end of the stick. You know, when I tell young women what testosterone does to women’s bodies, including women who are on testosterone. They tell me that nobody had told them that. They’d never heard that. So nobody’s informing anybody. So that parent is in a very difficult position. And on top of that, their child has been radicalized online. Their child will have been researching this for quite a while, will have been watching YouTube influencers, TikTok videos, Been on chat boards on Reddit, will have said things like, I think I might be trans. And if you do that, if you’re on a Reddit, on a subreddit that’s about trans issues, if you say I think I might be trans, they’ll tell you, if you think you are trans, you are. Nobody cis, that’s the opposite of trans, ever, so thinks they might be trans. And you’ll be groomed and you’ll be taught what to say to your parents and you’ll be primed to think that your parents are bigots if they don’t just go along with it straight away. So your parent might say something like, oh, that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how can a boy be a girl? And straight away, your the parents are transphobe and the child has been told, you cut them off, you get them out of your life, you know, you lock yourself in your room. The things, these parents, suddenly they’re in a nightmare. Anyway, so they don’t know what to do. They’ve got no support. They’ve got a load of misinformation, and they have to make a call. Like, they really have to. And if they decide what I would say to them, which is, you know, no medical interventions. Do not go near any medical professional on the subject of gender because they will put you down the pathway that we now know is not helpful. You’re very isolated. Your friends are telling you you’re a bigot. They think that it’s gay 2.0. They think that you’re like a homophobic parent in the 19 eighties. Nobody is supporting you. Your child hates you. You’re terrified about the suicide risk. You know, you may hold the line, but you may not. And if you don’t, you have made a choice that you can never unmake, and you must now think that you made the right choice. So those parents become the most, dedicated to the whole narrative. And they’re the people who will never ever change their mind no matter what, because it’s in the past for them. They can’t undo it. So those parents are not reading the CAS review with an open mind and thinking to themselves, that’s interesting. You know, so when Lydia came to me and told me she was really a boy, and I said yes, and got her private puberty blockers and hormones because the NHS waiting lists were too long. And she had the mastectomy a year ago, and I’ve been calling her a boy for the past 5 years. There was no evidence for any of that. It didn’t make her feel any better. Oh, how interesting. They’re thinking, doctor Cass is a transphobe and a bigot, and, you know, she used bad research, and she ignored all the activists, and she listened to transphobic bigots like Helen Joyce, you know, or whoever. Because that’s what they’ve got to believe, to live it themselves. So those people are just going to be a massive roadblock to us getting, a well structured and supportive, medical treatment for distressed children going forward, because they need it to be true, what they did. I’m so glad I was never in that situation. My heart goes out to them. Yeah. Well, I I must say, 9 days too. That is an awful contemplation, because all parents wanted well, basketball. Yeah. Really. Nearly all. Really. Nearly all parents want to do the right thing. In your book Trans, you talk of institutional capture by trans activists funded by billionaires. What institutions are being typically captured by this ideology? And and what sort of billionaires? Why are they interested in this, and who are they? Yeah. So the billionaires is a small bit of it, really. The institutional capture is the term whereby an institution gets over time taken away from its original mission or purpose and shifted around, and it’s very common. So in particular, there there’s a particular type called producer capture, which is when, for example, you set up a regulator for an industry, say, the telecoms industry or something like that. And, of course, the people that fund them will be the telecoms companies, and the people they talk to are the telecoms companies. And over time, the regulator gets captured by them and starts to be not much of a regulator anymore. It becomes a lobby group. So that’s a really common one. Like, it just, you know, regulator to lobby is is a well worn pathway. I think the the this one started with the big and impressive lobby groups that grew up or activist groups that grew up out of previous civil rights movements, in particular, and the gay liberation and black liberation movements, and to some extent women’s suffrage. So, you know, tiny, you know, gutsy activists with no money set up groups that then became the ACLU or the National Organization For Women or the Human Rights Campaign or, what’s what used to be called the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation or Stonewall here in the UK. And they were immensely impressive institutions that achieved their aim. You know, there’s still racism. Yes. There’s still sexism. There’s still homophobia, but they achieved their aims. And then those organizations had no reason to exist anymore. So they got kind of co opted and subverted to do something new. I think this is called the Saint George Syndrome, by Quint Saint George has run out of dragons to slay. Who what does he do next? And for tiny amounts of money, like Stonewall got a small grant, I think of the order of sorry, that’s our main gay rights organization. That’s now exclusively a trans rights organization. It got a small grant from an American foundation called the Arcus Foundation of about a 100 k in 2015 on condition that has added transgender to its list of campaigning goals. And now, you know, less than a decade later, that’s all it does. So that’s an example. You asked about billionaires. I mean, there are some very big international foundations and funders, not all of them from 1 billionaire, but some of them, yes. Gates, Soros being 2 examples of big billionaires. I don’t think either of those people wants to sterilize kids at all. But I think they have very large foundations that make a lot of grants and that are staffed by young activists who went into them in order to do what they regard to social justice activism. And the fact is that it’s fashionable among young people to think that, the right of people to identify as the opposite sex is a human right and is in fact an extremely important human right. And so, you know, it it is just a matter of record that the Open Society Foundations have given fairly significant money to organisations that have done things like write model laws for gender self ID, which include children that say the children of any age should be allowed to change their legal sex without parental, input. And then they try, you know, the those those, the smaller organizations that they give money to then go and peddle those laws around dozens and dozens of countries. That’s how my own country, Ireland. I’m actually Irish, although I live in the UK. How it got gender self ID in 2015. It it you know, there were about 50 countries in the Council of Europe where activists were kind of selling them these model laws, and Ireland jumped. And then suddenly, we went from having no possibility of legal sex change to it being just something that you fill in a form online, and they’ll send you back a new birth cert. So that’s institutional capture. And why did it happen? Well, as I said, there are people who really want it to happen. But more than that, we just have this enormous, now somewhat outsized machinery of NGOs and charities campaigning that we inherited from the 3 big liberation movements, you know, women, black people, gay people, and they don’t have the same legislative goals as they used to, all the legislative goals. You know, we’ve got gay marriage, we’ve got women to vote, There’s no legalized difference between the races in America, especially especially anymore. So they have I have to do something. Saint George needs a new dragon to slay. This is what they’re doing. And why this? Some people want it, but also it’s fashionable. And kids have been on it for now 10 to 20 years in schools and online. But, yeah, that’s why. It’s a fascinating part of your book where you talk about a condition called I think it’s pronounced autogenephilia. Autogynephilia. Gynephilia. And that condition drives a lot of trans activism and trans anger towards women. What is it? How do we understand it? I’ve not heard of. So, I mean, it’s a fancy word that’s made from 2 Greek words. It means love of oneself as a woman. And I basically did refer to it earlier, but I just said that it’s erotic cross dressing that’s become a fixation. So it’s not exactly that because the fixation isn’t necessarily on the clothes. It’s on the body. But they’re, you know I mean, the best estimate of the number of men who are cross dressers is about 3%. Right. So some share of those men, it’s not just about the clothes for them. It’s about the whole idea of being a woman. That’s what’s erotic. They imagine being a woman when they’re making love. They imagine being a woman you know, it turns them on to just do anything that is coded female. And I don’t mean necessarily dressing up in rubber and high heels. I mean, there have been a few books written, very frank books by people who men who recognize that they’re autogynephilic, and they say anything that’s coded female. So, like, knitting is sexy or taking a pill and pretending that it’s the, the contraceptive pill or, you know, going to a women’s book group as opposed to a mixed book group. Anything that they can sell to themselves as I really a woman is in itself sexy. And that, you know, the clinicians have known for decades that a significant number of the men who come saying I I meant to be a woman, it is driven by their erotic fixation on that idea. And the men will commonly disguise that, but there are ways which I don’t know how, you know, how vivid you want me to be. There are ways of telling when men are turned on, including in a research setting. And so, you know, this this this idea has been tested and has been found to be sound. Like, people will tell you that this is a debunked idea. It is absolutely not. The research is as sound as anything in this field. Really pretty sound. But the fantasy isn’t about pretending to be a woman. It’s about actually being a woman. And that means that somebody who tells you you aren’t is destroying something very precious to you. So those men are quite vicious to women who say, look, it’s wear what you like. But you can’t come into women’s spaces because you’re not actually a woman. Because that woman is destroying their dearest fantasy and the thing that has become, over time, incredibly central to their desires, image of themselves, longings for the future, their idea about what it is to live a good life, all those things. And so they turn on you. They hate you for it. Like, all I ever say is, you can’t change sex, and I’m not going to pretend you can. I never say to a man who says he’s a woman, or even about a man who says he’s a woman, I hate you. You’re a pervert. Or, you know, you’re a bad person. Or you can’t wear dresses. I just say, but you’re not a woman. And, you know, half of humanity isn’t women and they’re fine. There’s nothing wrong with being a man. And if you’re not a woman, then you can’t come into women’s spaces. You can’t get onto women’s short lists. You aren’t entitled to play women’s sports. I’m not gonna call you a woman. And I’m treated as if I am the worst human being in the world for saying all of that. And the doctor who create the the clinician who created the name, autogynephilia, a Canadian guy called Ray Blanchard, you know, he he’s retired now. Like, I think he’s still reasonably active, but he’s he’s in retirement. And he watches the way that, you know, some very high profile, middle aged male transitioners talk about and to women like me online, and he sees a narcissistic rage in it. They they hate us because we they see us as withholding what they want, which is validation. And I mean, in particular, those men, if they’re heterosexual men, as they pretty much always are, they see themselves as lesbians because they’re now women. So they want lesbians. They want into lesbian spaces. And so lesbians come under more pressure than anyone else on this. And a lesbian who says, you know, sorry. I mean, sorry if this is beyond your your comfort zone, but lesbians have these slogans like lesbians don’t do dick. Like, that lesbian is a she’s a bigot. She’s a bigot for for drawing the line at her own body as to who she’s willing to have sex with. I think that’s another reason this has all gone so far is there are a small number of really, really, really vicious men pushing it. Yeah. That’s I gotta say it’s deeply concerning. There’s always a political element to this, of course, these sorts of debates. You’ve already alluded to that. Now the British prime minister has endorsed the CAS review. I understand that very real restrictions have now been placed on, puberty blockers, for example, being made available to children. I don’t know what at what age. They are now legal. But, what’s the mood? Do you think he’s going to find this widespread acceptance? Will it become a political divide? And any feeling at this early stage as to how it might play out? This is, of course, a very real topic in Australia, now as, as we look particularly at the state of Victoria, and shake our heads in absolute disbelief at the refusal to accept that the debate has moved to a vastly different place as many sensible people recognized it would when they were passing that legislation some years ago. I I I’ll say it. I am astounded, by the lack of awareness and thoughtfulness and and ability to read what was going to unfold by some of the people who supported it, let alone those who put it up in the first place. Yeah. I mean, it’s worth remembering that the the Tories, the conservative party have been in power here since 2010. So all of this has happened under their watch. Yeah. I do think that they are sincerely now in significant number aware that this has been a disaster of many in many ways. I mean, we’ve only talked about the medical disaster. We haven’t talked about the disaster that it is for women’s rights or for gay people’s rights or for freedom of speech and belief. Like, it’s a it’s a multifaceted disaster, and it unfolded under them. So I think the point was that for a long time, activists, wherever they were, which includes on the right, there are some people in the conservative party who are very wedded to this ideology. For a long time, they were the only people talking about it. Other people didn’t realize they really meant what they said when they said that sex isn’t real. They thought it was just a figure of speech and that we were only talking about a few distressed people. Or they just thought it wasn’t very interesting. I mean, you know, the things that people say to me, as well as the, you know, but they’ll kill themselves if you don’t let them, they say, we’re talking about a tiny number of people, aren’t we? And it’s not so tiny anymore, by the way. Nearly every school will have some kids who identify as trans in it now. But anyway, we’re not talking about just the people who identify as trans. We’re talking about all of us. If you allow men into women’s spaces because those men say that they’re women, you’re affecting all women, and that’s half the population. But it took people a long time to realize that. So I would say now that the majority of the Tory party knows well that this has been a disaster and is fairly committed to doing something to row it back. But there’s significant internal opposition. But also, you know, we’re coming to the end of the parliament. We don’t know when the next election will be, but we expect October. That’s the base case. And there’s not much time left for new new legislation. And you may have noticed there is a lot else on. The world is not in a great state. So I don’t think there’ll be very much done outside the issue of pediatric gender medicine, where I do think CAS has given the impetus, really to to crack down on the excesses. And pretty much nearly all of the the, the way that it’s practiced now is excesses. And then Labour are expected to form the next government. Keir Starmer, who is expected to be the next prime minister, has said that he welcomed the Cass review. He has rode back from very extreme support, very extreme and unthinking support for trans, slogans like trans women are women no debate. But I don’t think he’s interested, not really. Wes Streating, who is a very central figure because I think he’s expected to be the next health secretary, he really has seen the light on this. But, you know, there there are very many more activists on the other side, within the Labour Party. So there’s significant worries about how that will play out. And, of course, there’s also this narrative that it is a left right issue. It is less so here than it is in America because the people who have been leading the fight against all of this are in fact women on the left. They’re women who identify as feminists, who are part of the, you know, sort of movement feminism. Often women who think of themselves as socialists or as radical feminists. And they’re the ones who’ve been working for years years. You know, I I mean, for example, the journalist Julie Bindel, who’s a long time campaigner against violence against women. And she’s a lesbian and campaigns for lesbians rights for child safeguarding. She was canceled over this in 2003 when she noticed that it was happening. And she wrote about a case of a rape crisis center in Vancouver that was coming under pressure to allow men to come in if they’re identified as women. So she’s been at this for more than 20 years. And I mean, you could never call Julie right wing. But, you know, there’s the fear that it will become more polarized And there’s fears that nothing will happen under the next government. And the thing is, it’s gone so far that you need to actually really push hard to roll it back. Nothing means that it gets solidified. Like every year that we continue to teach children lies about the human condition, we’re creating another generation, another year’s cohort of children who think that it’s bigoted to notice that there are 2 sexes and who are confused about their own sexuality, what it means, their own sex bodies, and who think that older people are bad people for trying to do things that are being done for safeguarding reasons and to protect people’s rights. They think that free speech is just a right wing dog whistle. You know, it feeds into a lot of other things about race, free speech, polarization, and so on. But I don’t think we’ve any choice but to fight it. Because, you know, what looks like a small issue, like just starting by saying, what you say you are is what makes you male or female. Like you can say it in one sentence. The ramifications are incredible. It breaks everything it touches because it’s a lie about something that’s very central to the human condition. And lies propagate outwards in institutional rules and in laws and in practices and policies. And when there’s a lie in a system, people learn that they can’t talk about it or anything that touches it, and they must protect it. And over time, it distorts everything and twists the institution around so that it works against itself. I mean, the example I gave of teachers concealing something so important from parents because they said that the child would kill themselves and they needed to for safeguarding reasons, That’s an example. They accepted a lie, and now they’re acting very much to harm that child and every other child in the school And that family, like, that family will never be the same again. And they’re doing it because they say it’s safeguarding, because there’s something broken at its heart. I have to say, it’s been a very moving conversation. I certainly salute you if your persistence in using your undoubted skills to research this properly and for your compassion, which drives you, I think, to do something that’s not just courageous, but reveals your real concern for these children. Can we just round this out? What advice would you give for parents who are in the awful situation, that we’ve been talking about, that they’re suddenly confronted with a child who’s in a troubled place. And they’re probably increasingly the parents not that it’s not just that they’re unaware now of how to handle this, I suspect. They’re probably most of them or a lot of them would be aware of how dangerous this actually is. That that they’re they’d be aware, particularly in Britain of the Cass report. They’d be aware that the debate is shifting. How how would you advise people to handle this if their parents in particular wanted to do the right thing by their their troubled kids? I mean, I’d advise not starting from here in the sense that, you know, all parents need to think that this is something that’s now basically in the wild. Like, it’s being taught, it’s online, and so on. So, you know, prepare that this won’t be your child. You can’t be sure that it won’t be your child, but do what you can to preempt it. And that means being really, really, really clear with your child from the very earliest age that sex change is simply not possible, that that’s not you being mean. That’s just part of the human condition, like, that everybody dies, but that that doesn’t mean that you can’t do what you want as a boy or a girl. Like, a girl who wants to be boyish can be boyish. A boy who wants to be girlish can be girlish. These things are fine. And inoculate your kid against that idea before they ever hear it. And keep lines of communication open. The parents that I know who found a way back out of this, they’re parents who have very strong relationships and very open relationships with their kids in which they’ve always been honest, admitted when they’re wrong about things, respected their children’s opinions, etcetera, etcetera. Of course, there’s lovely parents like this that it hasn’t worked out for them. I’m not saying that if you’ve, you know, not had the outcome you want, that you’re a bad parent. I’m definitely not saying that. If your child does come to you, time is your helper. And and, you know, don’t shut things off. Teenagers in particular, they’re very alert to any sense of disrespect. And if you are dismissive about it, they will shut down, and they will think that you are just old fashioned and bigoted. And if you resist it, they’ll get oppositional about it. So what you’ve got to do is just keep really, really open and keep asking them to tell you. Like, say, oh, this is so interesting. It must be hard to feel like that. You know, tell me more. Explain to me so I understand. That’s really interesting. What about this? You know, that doesn’t make so much sense to me, but there’s probably something I’m not seeing. Explain it more. Because the thing is, this is not a sensible ideology. And once you try and really spell it out, you realize bits of it contradict each other. And also that it’s very regressive because it suggests that conformity to stereotypes or desire to conform to stereotypes is what makes you into one category or the other. Get your kid to say that. Don’t say it to them. Get them to say it themselves. So just keep saying, God, you know, that sounds really weird. So so like, you’re saying that people who know that they’re a girl are girls. Like, how would you know that you’re a girl? Explain. Like, don’t shut them down. And just try to keep them away from influences that put these ideas in their head or that reinforce them. I mean, you really, really have to be careful about what your kids are saying online. Like, we haven’t even touched on this. I think parents are very aware now that there’s a lot of pornography and that it’s very vicious online and that most kids can get to see it. That’s a big part of why the girls are going for this. But it’s not just porn. No. No. No. We know that. And we know too that phone time instead of playtime is wrecking devastation on young people’s lives. And Yeah. You wanna get them out away from screens into the real world. You want to get them to think about helping other people rather than focusing on themselves because this is part of a wider mental health crisis, that children are being taught to be fragile instead of strong. You want to, really be careful if you have a teenage girl. If you’ve got a smart, quirky, literate teenage girl, she may be on sites where people are sharing fanfic. And, you know, that can be great. It can be a lovely outlet for creativity, but some of it is very dark and very pornographic. And it kind of sits in a doom loop with the things that are happening on porn. And parents are totally unaware of it. They think their daughter’s writing or that she’s reading, but what she’s writing and reading can be teaching her very bad things. And I would really be careful about what is happening in your children’s schools. Like, we can’t fix this family by family. We have to fix it fix it at a societal level. And for parents, that’s going to be schools first and foremost. So get informed about what your school is teaching your children. And if they won’t tell you, keep pushing, make alliances with other sensible parents, concerned parents, try to get elected to the school board. Do all of this before it comes to your child, if you possibly can. And if you are lucky enough that it hasn’t touched your family, it’s up to you to act. Because the people whose family it has touched commonly can’t act. Like it’s one of the difficulties here is that parents whose children have got caught up in this and find it very hard to speak publicly, and mostly can’t actually, because it’s too close to their own family and their own child. People don’t talk about their own children, rightly, in public. So the rest of us have to do it for for them. Like, people people come up and they tell me just the most awful stories. Like I’m at parties, and I’m having a lovely time, and then someone will come and tell me something that makes my heart want to break. And, you know, and then they say, and I can’t say a word. You know, I’ve been cut off by my friends and family. The school are against me. My doctor is against me. My child is against me. You know, people who have lost touch with kids at 18 have gone off to university and they haven’t heard from them for 3 years. It’s just awful. And one person told me that the, she lives in France, that the only reason she knows her son is still alive is that he’s still on her health insurance, and she sees him and he gets another bit of his body cut off. You know, you hear these stories, and she can say and do nothing because she’s hoping her child will come back. And if she speaks publicly, he won’t. And so that’s why it’s up to those of us who can, who haven’t been touched by it personally to do it. But, yeah, if it’s you, if it’s you, you know, you are up against it And it’s too late for all the, you know, prepare your child, prepare your family, prepare yourself, don’t end up here type advice. You’ve just got to stay calm. Bring your a game on parenting. And stay calm and ask questions and be open and try and keep them away from anything permanent, anyone who wants anything permanent. It’s hard. Thank you for your leadership, and and and thank you for the way you so obviously care, and that’s what motivates you. Well, thank you for having me on. Thank you.