The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast XX
[0] Hello, everybody.
[1] I'm speaking today to Dr. Miriam Grossman, who I first encountered as a consequence of watching Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman, where she made quite a spectacular appearance.
[2] Miriam Grossman, MD, is a physician, author, and public speaker.
[3] She has been vocal for many years about the capture of her profession, psychiatry, by ideologues leading to dangerous and experimental treatments on children and betrayal of parents.
[4] As I said, Dr. Grossman was featured in the Daily Wire's hit documentary, What is a Woman?
[5] She's the author of four books, and her work has been translated into 11 languages.
[6] After graduating with honors from Bryn -Mar College, Dr. Grossman attended New York University Med School.
[7] She completed an internship in pediatrics at Beth Israel Hospital in New York and a residency in psychiatry through Cornell Medical College, followed by a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry.
[8] Dr. Grossman is board -certified in psychiatry and in the subspecialty of child and adolescent psychiatry.
[9] And so I thought it would be interesting, especially given our shared interest as well in clinical matters because Dr. Grossman is a practicing clinician.
[10] I thought it would be interesting to have a further conversation.
[11] So that's what we're doing today.
[12] She wrote, You're Teaching My Child What?
[13] Back in 2009, which is pretty damn early, all things considered.
[14] And she has a new book coming out later this year.
[15] It's already available for pre -order.
[16] You can check that out in the video description.
[17] It'll be a URL link there.
[18] It's called Lost in Transnation, a child psychiatrist guide, Out of the Madness.
[19] And so out of the madness, that's pretty forthright terminology, you might say.
[20] So why don't we start on the biographical side a bit?
[21] You started to become concerned about the issues you've been writing and speaking about, well, obviously before 2009, because you wrote a book in 2009, and that usually takes a year or two.
[22] And so you're an early observer of things going seriously sideways on the clinical front.
[23] And so let's go back to, well, the decade of the 2000s.
[24] What were you seeing and why do you think you were concerned about it when so many of your colleagues, my colleagues, are still not concerned about it, let's say.
[25] Yes.
[26] Well, what happened is that I was researching sex education and what young people are taught in their sex education.
[27] And I was doing that because I was working with students at UCLA at the time.
[28] And there was such an alarming degree of sexually transmitted infections and abortions and so on that I was curious to know exactly what kids are being taught about sexuality.
[29] And I was quite shocked to see what they were being taught.
[30] But one of the things that shocked me, I think more than anything, was I discovered this, I like to call it a belief system or an ideology of gender that kids were being told, you know, that there's something called gender, which is separate from sex, and it's sort of like a psychological sex, and that a person can have a gender that's at odds with their physical reality and that that is normal and healthy.
[31] And in fact, it's wonderful to explore what your gender might be and so on and so forth, all the things that we know about that are being said right now.
[32] And that, that, I mean, I just couldn't believe it.
[33] I couldn't believe that.
[34] First of all, you know, it's not so.
[35] You cannot simply claim that you can divorce your identity from your physical reality, and all that is just all fine and good.
[36] That's dangerous, and I knew from the second that I saw it, I was very concerned about the destabilizing and confusing effect that that would have on young people.
[37] I mean, we want, as you know, in psychiatry and psychology, we want people to have a stable identity.
[38] People want to know who they are.
[39] They don't want to be confused about who they are, and they certainly don't want to be confused about something as important as whether they're male or female.
[40] And so...
[41] When I...
[42] When the pronoun legislation came out in Canada, Bill C -16, which mandated gender -ideological -related pronoun usage, well, in personal conversation, I told the Canadian Senate that that would cause enough confusion to produce a psychological epidemic among young women, because the literature on that's quite clear going back several hundred years.
[43] And I think you can make a pretty strong case, and you do this to some degree in your book in Chapter 7, that there are few more fundamental perceptual categories than male and female.
[44] I think they might be, that category system might be as fundamental as up or down or black and white or light and dark.
[45] Those would be the only ones that I can think of that are at the same depth of cognitive necessity, perceptual necessity.
[46] You know, one of the things that people tend to think when they think casually is that if you have more choice, you have more freedom, and more choice and more freedom is always good.
[47] But the problem with that is that a plethora of choice, so excess choice, excess option, produces not freedom, but anxiety, because there's only a limited amount of information that you can deal with at any given moment.
[48] And if people are put in a situation where everything is up for grabs, they're not free, they're terrified.
[49] And that's part of the reason, as far as I can tell, why rates of depression and anxiety among young people have skyrocketed recent years, especially among young women who are also the ones who are most likely to fall prey to psychological epidemics in general, and the one that we're in now specifically.
[50] And I certainly agree with that.
[51] And especially when one of those many choices that we're providing to young people is to deny reality.
[52] So it's not just that we're providing them with too many choices.
[53] You know, like when you walk down the cereal, the cereal aisle, and there's like 200 different kinds of cereal, and you get dizzy from it.
[54] That's not what we're talking about.
[55] We're talking about one of the options here is to actually deny reality.
[56] And it's not, I would even go further than that.
[57] There's a celebration of denying reality.
[58] There's a celebration of being confused.
[59] Now, you'll note that in the, you know, that LGBTQ includes that Q, and I think that's very important to look at.
[60] When you include the letter Q in the list of different identities, LGBTQ and then plus, the Q stands for questioning.
[61] Now, since when can questioning actually be an identity?
[62] And the meaning of identity is that it's something that is more or less fixed, not that it's something that's a big question mark.
[63] Well, identity, it would be useful to delve into that, too, because people don't really understand what an identity does.
[64] and we have lapsed into this idiot subjectivity that's predicated on the assumption that you are whatever you feel.
[65] Now, first of all, that's a very bad measurement from a scientific or clinical perspective because you never rely, as a good clinician, merely on what people feel.
[66] You need multiple converging sources of evidence to make a diagnosis.
[67] But the second part is more relevant, which is that your identity is actually framework of attentional prioritization and action that enables you to function well in the natural and social environments.
[68] You could say the psychological, natural, and social environments.
[69] And what you feel you are is not going to be a useful identity if it's not integrated with other people.
[70] You know, Piaget pointed out, for example, that developmental psychologist that children have to integrate their ability to play.
[71] in a social context.
[72] They have to negotiate an identity even when they're just playing a game with their friends.
[73] And identity itself is socially negotiated, which the lefties should know, because they're all a bang -on about constructivism constantly.
[74] And so the idea that identity is only subjective, and that it's only defined by what you feel, is unethical, that's an unethical stance for clinicians to adopt, but it's also completely impractical, because your identity is the game you play with your, intimate partner, it's the game you play with your family, it's the game you play with your community, like you have to be nested socially at multiple levels of the social hierarchy in order to have a functional identity and then to replace that with merely what you feel and to enforce that by Fiat, while the only thing that could be more counterproductive than that is, as you pointed out, an identity that's only based on questioning, which is just a pathway to, you know, existential angst and hopelessness.
[75] Well, we have to acknowledge that aside from being unethical and confusing, it's extremely dangerous because it puts, and we have to always keep that in front of us.
[76] You know, I spend a lot of time talking with families, parents, kids, and people who have been through this ordeal, And so I always have in front of me, Dr. Peterson, their faces and their words.
[77] And one of the reasons that I wanted to do this interview with you is to give those people a voice.
[78] There's a whole population of individuals, and I'm speaking here.
[79] People have already talked about the detransitioners and you had Chloe Cole on, which was amazing.
[80] but I want to speak about a different population, and that is the parents, the parents of these young people who have fallen into, I'm going to say, this darkness and this confusion, these parents are traumatized, and let me just tell you a little story.
[81] A few years ago, I joined a support group, an online support group of parents who were new, whose kids had recently announced that they were the opposite sex or neither sex.
[82] And, you know, there are these private Facebook groups and other groups that parents attend.
[83] and they generally are anonymous and they have to be vetted.
[84] And, you know, there's this huge process that they have to go through that takes weeks and weeks in order to get the support that they need because our profession, the mental health profession, is not giving them, our profession is demonizing them.
[85] So they have to go...
[86] You're saying demonizing the parents who are concerned about what's happening to their kids on the gender education front?
[87] The parents that will not immediately, you know, jump into affirmation and that are feeling very strongly that this is not, you know, the real issue, that the real issue is that the child has underlying trauma or autism or anxiety or what have you.
[88] The real issue may be that the family has had a lot of, you know, there's been crisis or there's been losses or deaths or COVID or what have you.
[89] And the family is saying, look, my child is now saying that, you know, that they're transgender, but I really feel that there's other things going on here.
[90] Why are you immediately giving us a referral to an endocrinologist for blockers and testosterone?
[91] And those parents are traumatized because, well, they're traumatized for lots of reasons.
[92] Okay.
[93] Let's list their traumas.
[94] And I have a whole chapter.
[95] about this in my book.
[96] Because honestly, Dr. Peterson, I am so troubled by how these parents have been treated and are being treated by the mental health profession, by the medical profession, by the media.
[97] Well, you know, the most common problem that I've seen emerge out of that is this, so the American Psychological Association announced in its guidelines for gender -affirming care that there were no valid long -term studies of the psychological consequences of transitioning.
[98] And they attributed that to the prejudice on the part of clinicians and researchers against the trans community, which is, of course, absolutely preposterous accusation.
[99] But be that as it may. But then three or four pages later, they said, well, you know, the evidence is very clear that if you don't help people transition early, that their mental health outcome is much worse, including the risk for suicide.
[100] Now, both of those can't be true.
[101] We can't have an absolute dearth of long -term follow -up studies on the gender transformation front because of prejudice in the research field and know, without a doubt, that youthful transition is the best pathway to mental health, which it most certainly and 100 % is not.
[102] But that hasn't stopped idiot, coward, psychiatrist, psychologists, social workers, et cetera, from saying such things to parents as, well, would you rather have a dead child or a live trans child?
[103] And so they put that at the feet of the parents, which is, well, if you object to this, then all you're doing is increasing the suicide risk for your troubled child, which is about as cruel a thing as you could possibly say to parents.
[104] I can't imagine something more manipulative, and also something so ungrounded in anything approximating clinical fact.
[105] Now, it is the case perhaps that a young woman who is troubled emotionally who takes testosterone might feel a momentary improvement in mood that's a consequence of the physiological effects of the testosterone.
[106] But there's no evidence whatsoever that that's actually linked to the gender transition process.
[107] Now, you don't see the same elevation in mood, by the way, as far as I've been able to tell from the research literature, in the case of boys who are transitioning to girls, and that also indicates that it's more than likely pharmacological.
[108] But it is the case that the medical profession, the counseling profession, has been enticed into this situation and also compelled by legislation, gender -affirming care legislation, to outright lie to parents about the relative risks.
[109] And you know, like I know, that these kids who are gender dysphoric, their underlying condition, is something in the broader depression -anxiety realm, and that the gender dysphoria is only a, it's a variant expression of that underlying broader psychopathology.
[110] So look at what, if we look at what's happened in our conversation here just the past few minutes, we can see the pattern of what is happening on a broader scale in all these discussions, which is that we always return to the child.
[111] Now, I'm not saying, of course we have to talk about the kids.
[112] Obviously, we have to talk about the kids, but we have to talk about the parents and what all this is doing to families.
[113] It's a destabiling, destructive event in the family.
[114] It's an ordeal that they'll have to go through for years and years.
[115] And, you know, the way that I'm going to describe it to you, I don't know if you saw the movie Gone with the Wind, but there's an iconic scene in Gone with the Wind, and I'm going to use the description of that scene to help you understand where I'm coming from.
[116] So the scene that I'm talking about is when Scarlett O 'Hara is panic because Melanie is going to have a baby, and she runs to find the doctor to help with the delivery of the baby, and she goes in order to find the doctor, she goes to this, it's like a makeshift hospital on the grounds of a train station.
[117] And you see Scarlett O 'Hara walking through this just massive area of hundreds, thousands of injured, moaning, you know, bleeding soldiers, and some of them are dead.
[118] and a lot of them are being carried away on stretchers, and they're moaning and they're calling out to her.
[119] Well, Dr. Peterson, that's what I'm seeing.
[120] That's what I'm hearing.
[121] All the families, remember, for every kid that has fallen into the gender ideology trap or whatever we're going to call it, the ideology, the pit, there are lots of other people, not just parents, there's siblings, there's grandparents, there's aunts and uncles and cousins, there's a huge ripple effect on people.
[122] And we need to see that because it's not only the kids that are the casualties, the parents, the parents have trauma and they are grieving.
[123] And it's all, None of it is acknowledged except by each other in these secret groups that they have.
[124] And so what I did about a year and a half ago, I felt so troubled by what I saw going on and all these people calling me and, well, not calling me, but emailing me and the parents and I'd meet them and hear their stories and see their anguish.
[125] And, you know, a lot of their anguish was over my colleagues, my colleagues in medicine.
[126] So I felt that I wanted to speak to these parents, not just individually, but as a group.
[127] So I'm in touch with a lot of the parents of ROGD kids.
[128] And we arranged an online...
[129] And ROGD is what?
[130] Rapid -onset gender dysphoria.
[131] Yes, yes.
[132] Right, right.
[133] That's the psychogenic epidemic.
[134] Correct.
[135] Okay, so you arranged?
[136] Yeah, these are not the kids who, like Jazz Jennings, for example, from the age of two, comes to their parents and says, you know, I'm the opposite sex.
[137] This is a whole other thing.
[138] This is a social contagion.
[139] It's fueled by social media.
[140] Lisa Lipman described it.
[141] I'm sure that you've had other people probably discuss that.
[142] But yeah, so I did a few Zooms with the parents, 50, 60 parents.
[143] And I did it as much for them as for myself, honestly.
[144] I really felt that I needed to say a few things to them.
[145] And the gist of what I told them was I wanted to acknowledge the horrific ordeal that they're going.
[146] through.
[147] I wanted to acknowledge the trauma that they are going through.
[148] Real trauma.
[149] I'm not using that word, you know, people talk about, you know, being triggered from some little thing and they get upset, you know, they got a bad haircut or something, they got triggered.
[150] I'm not talking about that.
[151] Their equestrian hat doesn't fit.
[152] Right.
[153] It's the newest one, yeah.
[154] Okay, this is genuine, you know, this is genuine post -traumatic stress disorder, but it's not post.
[155] They're still going through it.
[156] The trauma is ongoing, okay?
[157] Day after day and week after week and sometimes year after year.
[158] So they have a stress disorder and they also have grief from their losses.
[159] And so when I went on to that Zoom with them, I wanted to recognize that because my profession is not recognizing it.
[160] And I thought that it was important that they hear from a psychiatrist that I knew how traumatized they were and how many losses and how much grief they were dealing with and that I knew that my profession has abandoned them.
[161] By and large, are there exceptions?
[162] Well, of course, there's exceptions.
[163] But by and large, if you look at the mainstream authorities, right, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society, the American medical system, on and on and on, we have abandoned these parents and their children, I believe.
[164] But I'm just talking about the parents.
[165] How do you account for that, the fact that in such short order, all of these high -level governing bodies and associations, not only on the psychological front, but as you pointed out, on the psychiatric and medical front, have gone full, have announced their full support for all of the presuppositions that are producing this psychological epidemic?
[166] I mean, how do you understand that?
[167] And how did you see it make itself manifest in 2009?
[168] Yeah.
[169] Can I want to go just go back?
[170] I didn't finish with my talks to the parents.
[171] I'm sorry.
[172] Please do finish that.
[173] I just want to finish that one part.
[174] So what I, you know, I was looking at my screen, you know, at the grid of all the different, the parents that were listening in.
[175] And I said to them that as a psychiatrist, I am acknowledging the ordeal, the terrible ordeal they're going through and that they have experienced and are experiencing trauma.
[176] And when your daughter comes home and her voice has dropped and she's growing facial hair, that's traumatic.
[177] And when your son comes down the stairs to go to the prom, to go to the prom, wearing a dress and heels and makeup, that's traumatic.
[178] And worse, of course, there's much worse than those things.
[179] You know, when you learn that your daughter is scheduled to have a mastectomy, when you learn that your son is having genital surgery and their kids are going to be sterilized, and they're never going to have, you're not going to have grandchildren.
[180] These things are traumatic and they are losses.
[181] And I apologized on behalf, not that anyone from my profession chose me to speak for them, but I decided that I wanted to do that, and I apologized.
[182] And I looked out, I looked at that grid, you know, when you're doing a Zoom and there's a lot people there.
[183] And I noticed that almost, you know, more than half the cameras, 80 % of the cameras were turned off.
[184] I could only see really a few faces.
[185] And at the time, I really, I didn't know why that would have been.
[186] I thought maybe, you know, they're in the kitchen or they're busy or I really didn't know.
[187] And then I found out later on, Dr. Peterson, that their cameras were off Because they were crying.
[188] They were crying just to hear a professional, a mental health professional, say to them, yeah, yeah, you're traumatized.
[189] You are dealing with grief, with serious grief, just like the trauma of someone that went through a natural disaster or 9 -11.
[190] just like the trauma of parents who are told their kid has cancer.
[191] No less than that.
[192] And in fact, more complicated than that.
[193] Because your trauma and grief is not acknowledged.
[194] It's disenfranchised.
[195] And as you know, disenfranchised grief, complicated grief, is much more difficult to live with, to deal with, and to heal with.
[196] so when you have a terrible loss and grief and you can't even share it with people at work or maybe even your own family and maybe your other children are endorsing the unreality and are using the new name and pronouns maybe even your spouse is and so some of these parents are living with such deep loneliness in their grief.
[197] And I just feel a calling to speak out for those parents and to give them a voice because they are terrified to be identified, most of them.
[198] For various reasons, they don't want to be recognized for their beliefs.
[199] in terms of their profession.
[200] They're still hoping that their child is going to desist and come out of the gender confusion, and they don't want their child to be aware that they're speaking out.
[201] So when I speak to parents, you have to understand they're very often in their cars.
[202] They're in the basement.
[203] They're in the garage.
[204] They're in their bathrooms, whispering.
[205] So you're not speaking.
[206] merely of disenfranchised grief, so we could define that as someone isolated, who's unable to pour out their heart, let's say, to anyone who's willing to listen.
[207] You're actually talking about demonized grief, because the understory here is that in our current political and ideological climate, if you dare to grieve about the fact that your child is being pushed towards surgical sterilization by idiot ideologues, then not only is that inappropriate, it's positively morally unacceptable, right?
[208] Because apparently this is something that all good thinking people, including parents, should only celebrate.
[209] And if you oppose it in any matter whatsoever, not only is that inappropriate, it's positive evidence that you're a bigoted, misogynistic, exclusionary, you know, racist, homophobe.
[210] All the satanic adjectives you can possibly imagine are going and be dumped on you.
[211] So it's worse than mere disenfranchisement.
[212] And that you are the reason that your child's mental health has plummeted.
[213] Right.
[214] You are the reason if your child makes a suicide.
[215] It is your fault for not affirming that child immediately.
[216] And what I have in my book is how, you know, advice for parents on how to deal with that, for example, if they have to admit their child to the hospital for a suicide attempt, how to talk with the staff at the hospital about this issue, when the staff is going to sit down with them, the treatment team is going to sit down with the parents and say, well, you know, you really, you have to affirm your child.
[217] This is why your child is trying to commit suicide.
[218] So I give parents very detailed advice on that conversation that they need to have with the staff at the hospital or with this, their therapist or at the schools, you know, I am, what I'm trying to do is to provide parents with the tools that they need in order, you know, they're trying to protect their child not only against the ideology, but against all the institutions that we used to trust our schools, our mental health, medicine, the field of medicine, hospitals.
[219] You know, the list goes on and on.
[220] Those institutions that we used to trust, parents need the ammunition and the wherewithal and the confidence to be able to go to them and say, well, hold on a minute.
[221] Let me just tell you about A, B, C, and D. And I give them the information that they need.
[222] So there is no consensus on this issue.
[223] You know, parents and everyone is being led to believe that there's a consensus on this issue of how do we take care of these kids?
[224] There is no consensus.
[225] There is an all -out war going on on a professional level that no one is hearing about because it's not being covered outside of people like yourself and other conservative media is covering the fact that there is an international debate going on.
[226] and that there are countries who have made a 180, the most liberal, LGBT -friendly countries, such as Finland and Sweden and England, as you know, have made a 180 in this direction, and so that a child living in Stockholm or Oslo is not going to be able to get those puberty blockers and that testosterone, in general, cannot get them.
[227] If they are entered into, you know, a very rare instance in which they perhaps are part of a study in which they're closely going to be monitored and watched and given a lot of psychotherapy and so on and so forth.
[228] But in general, kids are not going to be able to access those treatments.
[229] Whereas in this country, in this country you walk in and get blockers after half an hour.
[230] In this country, you walk into Planned Parenthood.
[231] Planned Parenthood has been particularly pathological on that front.
[232] They had a gender euphoria promotion advertising to kids the ease and low cost, ease of access and low cost of the minimal counseling necessary to start them on puberty blockers, which then turns into hormone therapy, which then generally leads down the garden path to surgery.
[233] This advice for parents is this in your 2009 book, you're teaching my child what?
[234] or in your new book, Lost in Transnation.
[235] No, no, it's coming up.
[236] It's coming up.
[237] In 2009, I had no idea that things would explode like this.
[238] In 2009, I thought that when I described what kids were being taught in sex education, using our tax dollars, that they were being taught all this rubbish about gender and, you know, born in the wrong body.
[239] And, you know, it's a matter of, it's oppressive to be taught.
[240] that we are all either male or female and that we have to break out of that oppressive way of thinking.
[241] Binary, yeah, that oppressive gender binary.
[242] I thought that when I demonstrated that kids were being taught that, there would be a huge reaction.
[243] Sadly, that did not happen.
[244] And this huge reaction is only taking place many years later when we are being faced with this terrible crisis.
[245] Okay, well, so I thought, unless you have another direction you want to take this, and I thought we might delve into the gender issue for a moment, both scientifically and historically, I would like you to tell the audience a few things about John Money, for example.
[246] So let's for it that way.
[247] Okay, I'm just, I'll say one more thing.
[248] I'll just say one more thing about the parent.
[249] I'm very devoted to the parents.
[250] Okay, we, you know, everyone is terribly, concerned about the suicide rate among kids who are questioning or confused about their gender identity.
[251] And of course, we have to always be concerned.
[252] One suicide is too many.
[253] We're all on the same page about preventing suicide.
[254] Okay, but no one is talking about the fact that, you know what?
[255] some of the parents are suicidal.
[256] This whole thing is driving some of the parents to feeling suicidal.
[257] And I'm talking about parents who have gone through the most terrible things in their lives.
[258] And this issue, this particular ordeal with their child, seeing their child slip away and become someone unrecognizable, both in terms of their personality, and their physical persona.
[259] And in terms of their future losses, will this child be totally estranged from the family?
[260] Is this child going to come visit me when I'm sick in the hospital?
[261] Is this child going to come to their siblings' weddings?
[262] So you have to understand that even parents who are, you know, who went through divorces or cancer or 9 -11 or what have you, terrible things, and they were able to go through those things without psychiatric help, without medication.
[263] This particular issue, they tell me this is worse than all of that.
[264] And now they do need medication.
[265] And now they can't sleep.
[266] And now they can't get through the day.
[267] Well, I can barely imagine anything worse than being in a situation where you have a child who's been pressured by idiot ideologues and potentially your spouse as well to radically transform themselves in an extraordinarily destructive way in a manner that's going to echo down the decades that's going to disrupt the entire family structure permanently and that's going to turn the person you love into something like a confused monstrosity.
[268] which I think is the most general outcome, and that you are powerless and made powerless as well by the courts to do anything about it, and also subject to the punishment of law, if you dare to voice your anti -transition opinion.
[269] I mean, that's a pretty dismal corner of hell.
[270] Okay, so, yeah, so I also address that.
[271] I address schools.
[272] I have a chapter on schools in this upcoming book, understanding what's going on in the schools.
[273] This book that's coming out, Lost in Transnation, is not only a book for parents who have a child that is currently in this ordeal.
[274] It's a book for parents whose children are little or who have not yet been influenced to go in this direction.
[275] I want to help parents to be proactive so that they can dodge this nuclear bomb.
[276] and not be ambushed by it.
[277] Parents are being ambushed by this.
[278] They don't expect it.
[279] They think it's not going to happen in their family.
[280] And I want parents to know that no family is immune, and they must be prepared for this.
[281] They have to get educated.
[282] They have to understand what they're dealing with, what the ideology is about.
[283] I prefer to call it a belief system, but whatever, you know, what the school, what's going on in the, the schools, in the courts.
[284] What if CPS, what if the Department of Family and Services knocks on your door and they're there with the police?
[285] What are you going to do?
[286] I have, I and I tell parents what to do when that happens.
[287] What are their rights?
[288] That's another experience that's extremely stressful for families, for a family that's been striving to act in a decent and appropriate manner to have child protection services show up on the doorstep, especially with the police, especially when they threaten the other kids, let's say, with being removed from the family, and also make a public display so the neighbors can watch and also set the parents who are conscientious back on their heels with regards to grief and guilt for being accused by the authorities of doing such things as abusing their children, is that that's absolutely devastating to people.
[289] I know many people to whom that's happened.
[290] That's just one bit of the nightmare that you're describing.
[291] It's, it's, it's unfathomable how bad this is, how evil this is.
[292] Well, so let's delve into that a little bit.
[293] So I wrote an article a while back, which I tried to make as hard -hitting as I possibly could.
[294] We published that in the Telegraph, and I described the people who are engaged in this on the counseling side, so our professions, let's say, as liars and the surgeons who are participants, in this utter greed -inspired, delusional, sadistic madness as butchers and called for jail sentences, for example, for the people who were involved, which is about as harsh as I could manage.
[295] And, you know, the response to that column was remarkably positive.
[296] First of all, it was published, which shocked the hell out of me. And second, the responses, generally speaking, were extraordinarily positive.
[297] And given that, and given as well, that, you know, I know many of my clinical calls, and many, many clinicians around the world.
[298] And it's not as if they don't have more sophisticated theories of identity than those are being put forth by the gender ideologues.
[299] How the hell do you account for two things?
[300] I asked you this question earlier.
[301] The absolute capture of these once respectable institutions, which is appalling beyond comprehension, but also the unbelievable cowardice demonstrated by members of the psychiatric, psychological, and counseling communities, I mean, some of it's ignorance.
[302] You know, you talk to counselors now and then who are so damn poorly educated that they buy the gender ideology.
[303] But there's the vast majority of well -trained clinicians are wise and perspicacious enough to know perfectly well that these identity theories are, to call them simplistic and diluted, is barely to scratch the surface, but they're unbelievably timid about coming forward.
[304] And so what the hell happened?
[305] Like, how did this capture take place?
[306] And how do you account for this stunningly, widespread dereliction of duty and utter cowardice.
[307] Well said, well said.
[308] Okay, well, this is one of the, my goals of the book also, is to educate parents so that they understand the background.
[309] So you mentioned John Money.
[310] Of course, this goes back to John Money.
[311] John Money introduced the idea of gender identity.
[312] He coined the term gender identity.
[313] and he said that the gender identity is completely separate from biology and that it is something, it is one's identity as male or female, because back then, of course, we didn't have the non -binary and, you know, in between, all that, you know, 47 different gender stuff.
[314] So in the 50s, when John Money was writing and speaking about all this, we had male, male and female, and his theory was that male and female is something that is foisted on a baby, a child, by society, and that it is unrelated to biology.
[315] He further said that men and women, males and females have biological distinctions, but they are limited to menstruating, gestating, and lactating.
[316] And that that was it.
[317] Aside from those three things, everything else in terms of personality and preferences for activities or, you know, cognitive abilities, emotional styles, perceptions, that is all, it's a social construct, okay, it's all put on the child in the first two and a half to three years of life.
[318] And then John Money said it's fixed.
[319] So, you know, when you put the pink blanket on the little girl and the blue blanket on the boy, and then you give them the toys, and you give them, you know, you have certain expectations, based on whether it's a boy or a girl.
[320] And all those things, the frilly dresses and the, you know, the 50s was a time, of course, of stereotypes.
[321] So he spoke about it in terms of, you know, the girl's going to be in the kitchen making cookies and the boy's going to be out, you know, fixing the car with his dad.
[322] And he said, if you take a girl, you know, with ambiguous, okay, I'm sorry, let me let me go back a minute.
[323] John Money's specialty, his interest was in hermaphrodites.
[324] Okay, very rare babies that are born with ambiguous genitalia and those ambiguous genitalia are due to some congenital issue, either endocrinological or or or due to chromosomal abnormality.
[325] And the baby is born, they take a look at the genitals, it's just not clear what's going on.
[326] And that's where the term comes from.
[327] This is important.
[328] Assigned sex at birth.
[329] Assigned.
[330] Because in those cases, and these were the cases that John Money became an expert in, and he opened up a center specifically having to do with, I mean, his PhD that he wrote in the 50s, was on the issue of sex assignment of hermaphrodites.
[331] What do you do?
[332] It's a crisis.
[333] You have to say we had a girl or we had a boy.
[334] And so what do you do in those cases?
[335] And you had a special interest in this.
[336] Now, you and I know that when someone has a certain interest in their life that consumes them to the point that they're writing their Ph .D. about it.
[337] They're studying it.
[338] they make it their career, there's usually a reason behind it.
[339] And it's worthwhile exploring that reason.
[340] Now, when you look at John Money, when you look at John Money and his early life, and he wrote about this, he was very open about it, he grew up in a, he grew up under the hand of an abuse, Yusuf, alcoholic, out -of -control father who would beat him and his mother.
[341] So John Money, as a child, was not only beaten, but watched his mother being beaten.
[342] He no doubt had a terrible childhood, and that influenced his image of masculinity was this monstrous individual.
[343] And he wrote later on, he grew up on a farm, by the way, and he wrote later on in one of his books that he realized that the world might be better off if not only animals, but men were gelded at birth, castrated.
[344] Okay, so gelded is the word, you know, used for animals.
[345] So he said that the world might be a better place if men were gelded.
[346] And he also wrote, he said, I wear the vile mark of male sexuality.
[347] In other words, we would call that gender dysphoria.
[348] He's talking about his own body.
[349] and he's saying that his genitals were vile to him.
[350] That is gender dysphoria.
[351] We didn't call it then.
[352] We didn't have a name for it back then.
[353] So clearly, John Money was uncomfortable to say the very least with his own masculinity and his own body.
[354] So it's not a surprise that he would be.
[355] come up with a theory that if true would comfort him on some level, that he is not going to become his father.
[356] He's not his father.
[357] Even though he shares the same type of physical reality, his body, his genitals are of a man. But if his theory is true and there's such a thing as gender.
[358] which is completely separate than biology, then it gave John money, like, a way out of not identifying with a monster.
[359] Well, so you can imagine, you can imagine the psychological impetus there is if you make the initial assumption that there's a certain degree of innate pathological aggression associated with masculinity, and then you develop a counter theory that much of that is in fact socialized, then there's a root out of it.
[360] And that gives him, well, that gives him an easy out.
[361] That's the thing, is that instead of having to contend with that internally, he can also externalize that and make that a sociological phenomena.
[362] I see this with the insistence on the trans activists part, that trans identity is much more common than it truly is, and that it's immoral to interfere with its manifestation.
[363] I see that as an extension of Freudian.
[364] in rationalization, you know, if you've taken a dramatic route in your life or something dramatic has happened to you, you have every reason to justify your decision post -hawk.
[365] And so let's walk through what happened with money.
[366] So he got involved in a very famous case, which is working out.
[367] He certainly did.
[368] He certainly did.
[369] But let's just tell your audience furthermore, that he wrote his Ph .D. on hermaphrodites and on how to assign their sex.
[370] And then he went on to open the first clinic in the United States for hermaphrodites for their treatment, including their surgeries.
[371] So he made available for the first time in the United States a place where there would be gender reassignment or sex reassignment, including the surgeries.
[372] And the surgeries involved castration, of course.
[373] So we go back to what he said about being gelded.
[374] And, you know, I can't help but think that on some level, he might have been thinking, you know, I'm, this is, I'm helping these kids.
[375] I'm helping these little boys by gilding them, by castrating them, and making them into women.
[376] Of course, they can't be made into women, but the way that he was thinking about it.
[377] So he had his theory, and he didn't have any way of proving it, because, I mean, how do you prove something like that?
[378] Until this family showed up at his doorstep, And it was a family, Canadian family, from Winnipeg, I think, right?
[379] I think that's right, yeah, yeah.
[380] And they were, the Reamer family, a blue -collar, very young couple, 20, 21 years old.
[381] And they had a horrific tragedy in their family, which is that they gave birth to twin boys.
[382] The boys were fine.
[383] and when the boys were, well, actually they had phymosis.
[384] Phimosis is an abnormality of the opening of the urethra at the tip of the penis.
[385] So the boys had fymosis.
[386] And so the doctors recommended circumcision for the boys.
[387] And they went in when they were eight months old for circumcision.
[388] And the first boy to go in for the circumcision.
[389] decision was Bruce, and the equipment, there was a malfunction of the equipment, and they were cauterizing the penis in order to circumcise it, and instead of just that small amount of tissue that was supposed to be cauterized.
[390] Apparently, the settings were incorrect, and the entire penis was burnt.
[391] So Bruce's penis was burnt, you know, beyond any functionality.
[392] So these poor parents went home.
[393] The other boy was not circumcised, just obviously.
[394] They went home, and what are they supposed to do?
[395] They have a boy without a penis.
[396] What the hell are they supposed to do?
[397] So months later, they were watching television.
[398] And John Money happened to be on there.
[399] And you have to know also that John Money was an extremely pompous, um, uh, self -assured individual.
[400] Uh, he was sophisticated.
[401] Uh, when he talked, you listened.
[402] he came across as being definitive, being, you know, calling the shots, knowing what was going on, knowing the research, knowing the truth.
[403] And he, in this interview on television, said that a boy can be raised as a girl, and a girl can be raised as a boy, if it's caught, if it's done early enough.
[404] And that early, enough means before the age of two and a half or three.
[405] And the parents, the Reamer parents immediately took note of that and they thought, here's the answer.
[406] This is the answer for Bruce.
[407] This is what we're supposed to do.
[408] So they contacted Dr. Money down in Baltimore and they And they made an appointment and took the twins down to Baltimore and went down there.
[409] Again, you have to understand that this was an uneducated young blue -collar family.
[410] And when they were interviewed later about their meetings with John Money, they described him as like, we just thought he was God.
[411] We just thought, you know, this is, I mean, he's a professor and he's, you know, got all the diplomas, and he's the head of this entire clinic at an outstanding university, one of the major universities in the world.
[412] That was at Johns Hopkins, right?
[413] Yes, yes.
[414] So you have to imagine this young couple coming, and they're at a loss, and they are looking for an answer.
[415] They've been praying, they're looking for an answer to their prayers, what are we going to do with Bruce?
[416] And John Money says, well, we have an answer for you.
[417] Because male and female is actually not related to chromosomes.
[418] It's not related to hormones.
[419] It's not innate.
[420] We can take little Bruce and we have to do some surgery on Bruce.
[421] We have to castrate him.
[422] And we'll remove his testicles.
[423] He already didn't have.
[424] a penis, we're going to remove his testicles, we're going to make, we're going to fashion, you know, some sort of elementary sort of female genitalia.
[425] You're going to give him a girl's name, and you're going to put him in pink dresses and give him dolls and raise him as a girl.
[426] And you are never, ever, Dr. Money told the parents, never to tell him that this was truly what happened.
[427] and, you know, after he was born.
[428] Never tell him, because that will ruin everything.
[429] And it's up to you.
[430] You have to just work your hardest to raise him as a girl and make sure that everyone around him is raising, is considering him a girl, because essentially he is a girl.
[431] And so not only was this the answer to the Reamer's prayers, this was, as you can understand now, the answer to Dr. Money's prayer.
[432] Right, right.
[433] He had an experiment.
[434] This was the experiment.
[435] This was his proof of concept.
[436] His concept was that being male and female is completely separate from biology.
[437] It's imposed by society.
[438] It's a social construct.
[439] And this was his proof of concept.
[440] And so, the Reemers went home.
[441] Well, he had his surgery.
[442] They took him home.
[443] They named Bruce Brenda.
[444] They put him in all the girl's clothing, and they gave him dolls, and they, you know, they did all the things.
[445] And he peed sitting down sometimes.
[446] Because as we'll learn later, he actually preferred urinating standing up, which is astonishing.
[447] We learned later that he always wanted to urinate standing up.
[448] And from the time he was in diapers, I think, he was told he was a girl.
[449] So that really is fascinating.
[450] But anyway, so they took him home, raised him as a girl, and Dr. Money started to follow the twins every year.
[451] They would come down for a visit.
[452] The parents would spend time speaking to Dr. Money, and then the money, I mean the money, here's a slip.
[453] Freudian slip for you.
[454] Dr. Money would take the twins without the parents into his office and spend time with the twins.
[455] So this went on for years.
[456] And Dr. Money began to report on his study that became a famous landmark study.
[457] And he called her Joan in his study.
[458] He was beginning to write about this and lecture.
[459] And he was claiming that Joan, a .k .a. Brenda, aka Bruce, was doing great.
[460] I mean, she was adjusting.
[461] She may be a bit of a tomboy.
[462] He would acknowledge that.
[463] But in every way, you know, she was adjusting and she was doing well with friends and with schools.
[464] And she liked playing with dolls and she would mimic her mom.
[465] And he was giving this glowing, glowing report from year to year.
[466] And in his, you know, professional writing of his studies, his report, and he was giving talks.
[467] And he was getting, you might imagine, tremendous attention.
[468] for this.
[469] I mean, you have to understand this was by now maybe, you know, the early 60s.
[470] This is feminism, okay?
[471] This is the sexual revolution.
[472] This is a time when society, or at least part of society, wanted nothing more to say that male and female is a social construct.
[473] And that in order to gain, you know, full equality, women have to be considered the same as men.
[474] And, you know, to have a study, such as this study of John Moneys, in which he was reporting that this baby who was, you know, normal chromosomes, normal everything biologically, but is being successfully raised as a girl because he has a girl's name and girl.
[475] and dresses and dolls, and all, you know, his entire society, his teachers and his grandparents and everyone is reinforcing the idea that he's a delicate girl who likes to cook and, you know, is going to grow up to have babies.
[476] I mean, this was huge.
[477] Now, what happened is that this theory of John Monies became what was accepted over the decades.
[478] We didn't find out what really happened with the twins until decades later.
[479] And in the meantime, during those decades, his theory became doctrine.
[480] Okay, his theory became just baked into, you know, so many fields of both soft and hard science, so that it was standard that whenever you had, for example, an X, Y, or any child that had ambiguous genitalia, if they could be raised as a girl, they'd be raised as a girl.
[481] So they'd be castrated, just automatically why?
[482] Because of the great success, because of what John Money proved to us, proved to us.
[483] And so lots and lots of boys all over the world.
[484] I mean, this was written into the, you know, the textbooks of endocrinology and the textbooks of genetics.
[485] I mean, this became truth, so to speak.
[486] Not that there weren't people, you know, other scientists that were standing up and saying, John, you know, this isn't proven yet.
[487] You know, let's look a little closer.
[488] I don't, this is not necessarily the case.
[489] But what did he do?
[490] he wouldn't tolerate that.
[491] John Money, you know, was a tyrant.
[492] He would not tolerate another psychologist or biologist or geneticist standing up and trying to publish something that would challenge his great gender theory.
[493] He would arrange, you know, he would intimidate the editors at the scientific journals to not publish those articles.
[494] It's a lot of what's actually going on right now is very similar.
[495] Right.
[496] So what happened with the twins is that after decades, in fact, John Money wrote a book in 1997 in which he said yet again that his twin study, that his gender theory had been confirmed and supported by the result of of this experiment with the twins.
[497] And the following...
[498] One -one -person experiment, by the way.
[499] A one -person experiment.
[500] Yeah, but even that one person, it didn't work.
[501] Okay, so in 1990...
[502] Right.
[503] Yeah.
[504] So in 1998, what do we call him now?
[505] Not Brenda, not Bruce, but what happened is that we discovered that he stood up and he said, he just blew the cover of this whole thing was a hoax.
[506] And his name was now David.
[507] Brenda had become David.
[508] And he was not only a man, but he was married to a woman and he had adopted three stepchildren.
[509] And he worked as a janitor in a slaughterhouse.
[510] So that was David.
[511] David Riemer, and people can go onto YouTube and hear him being interviewed about his experience of what it was like to be told for 14 years of his life that he's a girl, and to never, ever, ever feel that that was his truth.
[512] And what happened is that during all those years, he was not happy with his dresses and with his dolls.
[513] he was he was he wanted to go play with his brother's tours he wanted to pee standing up he wanted to you know he was rough he was he he was he was so boyish that and aggressive that kids called him a cave woman okay they made fun of him because the way the way that he walked and his gestures and his interest were all so masculine.
[514] And he was a miserable child, and the family was miserable, and on top of everything, when he was going back, when the family was going back for those yearly visits to Johns Hopkins with Dr. Money, Dr. Money was sexually abusing those twins.
[515] Okay, how?
[516] He was forcing them to undress and to mimic sexual intercourse, and he would say, you know, this is how, this is what men and women do together, and he would humiliate them and show them pictures.
[517] And the point came, why did they stop going down to Johns Hopkins?
[518] The boys refused to go.
[519] They refused to go back to see Dr. Money.
[520] And the parents couldn't understand why.
[521] He was quite the stunning creep, all things considered.
[522] Now, the Johns Hopkins also closed that clinic down, eh?
[523] Not how long after these revelations emerged did the kids?
[524] That would have been Dr. Paul McHugh, who is a, you know, a giant in this area, and he had the wisdom and the foresight, you know, to understand what was going on.
[525] He, he, he, he, there were some studies that were done that would follow up on the individuals who had the sex reassignment to see how they were doing, and those studies showed that they were no, they were, they were, they were still really suffering.
[526] They hadn't necessarily benefited from that surgery and that sexual reassignment.
[527] And he wrote about that in a great book, Dr. Paul McHugh, his book called The Mind Has Mountains, and he wrote a chapter called Surgical Sex, explaining how we would be wise if we pay attention to their psyches and help them emotionally and psychologically and not try to change their bodies.
[528] So Dr. McHugh closed up John Money's clinic.
[529] That is true.
[530] But you know what?
[531] The harm was already done.
[532] By the time it became public knowledge, and actually it's not even to this day such public knowledge, unfortunately.
[533] When it became public knowledge and a book was written by John Colapinto called As Nature Made Him, the boy that was raised as a girl, and it just told this entire story, story from A to Z. It's a shocking, shocking story.
[534] And everyone should read that book.
[535] So by the time that book came out in 1999 or 2000, it was already, you know, that theory was already baked into sex education and, you know, sociology and psychology and not, I mean, look, I have a book, Dr. Peterson, I have a book that was published in 1998, four kids.
[536] I brought it with me, show and tell.
[537] This book came out.
[538] It's called My Gender Workbook, and it has on the cover, if you see, the picture here is half a Barbie and half a Ken. Okay, obviously a book for young people, and the entire premise of this book is that the gender binary is false, that we are not, we do not all fit into this category of male and female, and they're not talking about hermaphrodites or intersex, okay?
[539] they're talking about none of us.
[540] No one fits into it.
[541] It's oppressive, and we need to rebel against it.
[542] So clearly written by the author is Kate Bornstein, an individual who has had a very interesting gender journey, going back and forth, born as a male, then a female, then back, and then neither.
[543] and this individual, Kate Bornstein, in 1998, again, I'm just, I want to emphasize how long ago this book was available and written four young people to challenge them and to, to indoctrinate them with the idea that society is placing on you these false restrictions.
[544] Society is telling you that you have to be a boy or a girl.
[545] And that is something that is, it's like racism.
[546] It's like sexism.
[547] It's a terrible thing.
[548] It's patriarchal oppression.
[549] Yes, and we have to break.
[550] In its purest form.
[551] So, you know, you have to understand that this is very enticing for teenagers who want to believe in something and want the world to be a better place.
[552] and they want to fight against something.
[553] They want to fight against the evil.
[554] So this is presented as another evil that exists in society.
[555] So, you know, and this book actually was recommended by, oh gosh, I'm going to say, I'm not sure, the American Psychiatric Association, or maybe it was the American Psychological Association, one of those major professional mental health organizations way before the DSM acknowledged gender dysphoria was not a disorder.
[556] So let me just be clear.
[557] A book like this, a book like this, and an individual such as Kate Bornstein, who had a very active schedule of speaking on campuses, public appearances, you know, all over the place, being made into a celebrity.
[558] This is all happening at a time when psychiatry still considered this a disorder.
[559] I mean, on paper.
[560] On paper, not identifying as male or female, not identifying, I'm sorry, with your biology in a way that's consistent with your biology, was still called at that time a disorder.
[561] Okay, this is 1998.
[562] The APA only changed the DSM in 2013.
[563] So this is 15 years before that.
[564] So what I'm trying to say is...
[565] Now, what happened to David Reimer?
[566] What happened?
[567] David Reimer committed suicide eventually, didn't he?
[568] Yeah.
[569] Yeah.
[570] Yes.
[571] So that's the denouement of that particularly trying to take.
[572] And his twin...
[573] So not only was this a failure, it was.
[574] Is a, aunt, go ahead.
[575] Oh, no. It was a disaster, terrible disaster.
[576] He committed suicide and his twin brother died of an opiate overdose before him.
[577] His twin died first.
[578] The entire family was, you know, what are the, what kind of words?
[579] I mean, trauma, it's not enough.
[580] Trauma is not enough to describe what that family went through.
[581] My parents didn't know a lot that was going on.
[582] And if they would have known, it would never would have happened.
[583] By me not saying anything, the medical community was under the impression that my case was a success story.
[584] I was shocked when I heard that people thought that my case was a success story.
[585] So what we should point out here, is that this experiment couldn't possibly have gone more cataclysmically wrong than it did.
[586] Not only was what Money was saying was not true in the technical scientific sense, it was an anti -truth, and he falsified the data, and it culminated in the death of two people, the demolition of a family, and the perversion of an entire culture.
[587] That's John Money's legacy.
[588] He never publicly acknowledged it.
[589] he never publicly acknowledged that the twins had, well, that one of the, I don't know what the, John Money died, I think, in 2006, and I think he had dementia.
[590] But when the book came out, and when John Colapinto's book came out, that just like exposed this whole calamity, there was nothing from John Money.
[591] He was still alive.
[592] He could have made a statement.
[593] Nothing.
[594] I'm just saying that that's just another, you know, indication of what the morality, the immorality of this person and the, you know, the lack of acknowledgement, you know, of what they're guilty of doing, I mean, you know, I guess it's too much to expect.
[595] Well, you were making a case a bit, you were making a case a bit that part of the reason the psychiatric and psychological professions, the medical professions, did tilt, in this gender -affirming direction was because money's research was taken as gold standard.
[596] And the pathology of that research wasn't revealed until like 25 years later.
[597] And so that excuses the profession to some degree.
[598] But by your testimony as well, all of this started to become pretty public knowledge by about the year 2000, that the money experiment had actually gone cataclysmically wrong.
[599] And yet what we've seen on the psychological, psychiatric and counseling front, medical as well, is a doubling down.
[600] of the insistence that gender is nothing but something that's socialized and that medical transition is the appropriate move.
[601] Okay, so that's all flying in the face of evidence now instead of being supported by evidence.
[602] And so what?
[603] But you know, do you have any thoughts about?
[604] Yeah, but not only that, not only that, it became more and more and more radical.
[605] So where we are today and where we are, I mean, even this book in 1998 is much more radical than John Money.
[606] This, at least John Money said, you know, you're either male or female and that you need and that that's fixed by the age of three.
[607] Okay, by 1998, kids were being told, no, no, no, no, that's an oppressive false binary.
[608] It's all on a spectrum.
[609] It's all fluid.
[610] And it's fluid for your entire life.
[611] And it's wonderful to explore and to question.
[612] and no one can tell you who you are, and just a million different ways, it's so much more radical.
[613] I mean, I wish almost that we were back with John Money's theory because it would be so easy to, you know, it's so easy now.
[614] We have so much information from hard science.
[615] In fact, if John Money were living today, he could never get published with such a theory that he had about gender and biology.
[616] I mean, it's ridiculous.
[617] We have too much information about the impact of the chromosomes, prenatally, and, you know, the impact of hormones.
[618] So we know now that male and female, you know, it's not only different genitalia, not only what John Money pointed out, you know, lactating and menstruating, We have each cell in our bodies, except for cells that don't have a nucleus, which are very few.
[619] But every cell that has a nucleus is stamped male or female, and it makes a difference.
[620] Right.
[621] Okay, so there's a female heart.
[622] We know now in cardiology that when it comes to, for example, arrhythmias, there's a difference in the type of arrhythmias that a woman might get as opposed to a man. There's a difference in the way that a woman who sustains a very difficult burn how her body might react to it as opposed to a man. And this is true for every system of the body.
[623] So your point, well, so your point is that not only do you see a gender difference, a sex difference, at the chromosomal level, but you see it at the cellular level and you see it at the level of systems of cells.
[624] So organs, you see it at the level of broad physiology.
[625] We talked about lactation and menstruation and gestation.
[626] But there's the entire menstrual cycle.
[627] There's the completely different effect of hormones.
[628] All of that manifests itself in different perceptual patterns and in temperamental patterns that are sex -type to a large degree.
[629] And so the point here is that what constitutes sex is instantiated as part of identity at every single level of the hierarchies that people are embedded in, biologically and then also socially, because the social roles that are assigned to men and women are not merely arbitrary, right?
[630] I mean, part of what you see with parents is that the manner in which parents socialize their children is much more directed by the children than people had originally presupposed.
[631] And so parents who are establishing a genuine relationship with their children use the cues from the child's behavior to govern their interactions with the child.
[632] And so more feminine girls tend to be treated by their parents as more feminine creatures and more masculine boys, et cetera.
[633] But the idea that that's all top -down socialization instead of bottom -up influence of biology is utterly preposterous, even though human beings are quite flexible in the manner in which they can be socialized.
[634] Well, the thing is, kids are being led to believe, and parents are being led to believe that you can step in with these very powerful medications, these hormones, and you can deny biology, and you can pause biology, and you can create a persona of the opposite sex without paying a huge price.
[635] That is the lie that's being told that you're not going to pay a price for this.
[636] Oh, yeah, might be a few side effects.
[637] No, no, no, no. You mean like a whole missing forearm, for example, and a penis that doesn't work, and sterility, and lowered voice, and decreased bone density and the increased probability of the development of cancer and no evidence whatsoever that there's any mental health benefit, and all the trauma that you put your family through, and all the regret that's going to emerge later in life when you find out that you're sterile, no ability to breastfeed, and complete loss of erotic sensation in the nipples, and etc., etc. You mean those risks, those trivial by the wayside risks that are completely ignorable given all the euphoria you're going to experience when you put yourself in the hands of liars and butchers?
[638] You mean that story.
[639] Okay, so this is what parents don't know that they must understand.
[640] And they have to understand this before their kid comes home and says, Mom, I'm not your daughter, I'm your son.
[641] They need to know this way before that happens.
[642] And that's what I want to do for them.
[643] Yeah.
[644] Now, look, the way that the legacy media and the left -wing activists react to a conversation such as ours is to point out that we're scaremongering and that this is, this doesn't really pose a threat to, let's say, the vast majority of people, and it's of much more help to the small minority that it's aimed at than it is harm, and that what we're doing is stirring up fear and gaslighting.
[645] And, you know, all the sorts of defensive maneuvers that the radicals engage in.
[646] So why do you think it's necessary for all parents?
[647] And so this isn't just parents who have kids with gender dysphoria.
[648] Why do you think it's necessary for all parents to be, what would you say, aware of what's going on in the schools?
[649] And why do you think that that's of sufficient widespread concern so that your concerns shouldn't be just dismissed as conspiratorial delusion, let's say?
[650] Well, first of all, let's look at.
[651] the numbers just in the past five years, ten years of this explosive growth of individuals who are coming in for treatment for gender dysphoria.
[652] So there is a hysteria that we're in the midst of.
[653] You know, it's a wave.
[654] It's a tsunami.
[655] I hope that we're at the crest of the wave right now, but we could just be at the beginning.
[656] I mean, you know, just 10 years ago, We had rates of, you know, one in 10 to 30 to 100 ,000 people with this particular disorder.
[657] We didn't even have numbers.
[658] It was so rare, let's say 20 years ago, it was so rare for a teenager to present as opposed to a little kid or an older person.
[659] It was so rare for, I mean, even they were rare.
[660] But it was even more rare for an adolescent to suddenly come out with this new identity and with gender dysphoria.
[661] So those people were so rare just 10, 15 years ago.
[662] And now we have studies showing, you know, 10%, 20 % of a high school class in an urban high school might identify as not being male or female.
[663] So I don't know where this is going.
[664] Is it going to 40%, that's why parents have to be aware of this.
[665] I would also say, in terms of fear mongering, you know, the charge of fear mongering, and it's really only a minority of people who are going to suffer, we have no data whatsoever to support that, no long -term data whatsoever.
[666] The data that we do have shows us that the regret over this, you know, massive life change and these surgeries might take eight to ten years to develop.
[667] Oh, yeah, yeah.
[668] Yeah, and I would add that not only does it take time to develop, it takes time to acknowledge it and to come out with it publicly.
[669] And the research that we do have.
[670] Do you have any advice?
[671] I was going to say that those people that regret it, they're not going back to the clinics and telling them, there's no one keeping the statistics on them.
[672] They're not coming back to their doctors and saying, how did you do this to me?
[673] They can't sue.
[674] It's too late.
[675] Yeah, yeah.
[676] So why have you got away with it?
[677] I mean, you know, people are canceled pretty hard, and it's really devastating for people to be canceled.
[678] Like, I've seen, I know about 200 people who've been mobbed for expressing opinions that aren't in in accordance with the radical leftist ideology.
[679] Most people respond to that being mobbed and excluded as if they've contracted a pretty damn serious illness, you know.
[680] I've seen very, well, Jay Baticharia, the physician from Stanford who was mobbed for his views on COVID, he lost 35 pounds in three months when Stanford basically turned its back on him.
[681] And I've seen my colleagues hounded into, well, into as a consequence of this.
[682] Now you've been standing up against this for a long time, and you dared to go on Mount Walsh's documentary, which was, you know, quite the provocative move.
[683] What is a woman?
[684] Can you tell me that?
[685] Well, you're at the Women's March.
[686] You must have some idea.
[687] Please, if one person could tell me what a woman is.
[688] You are not careful.
[689] What is that?
[690] Why is it that you've been able to get away with this, so to speak, and to be able to withstand it?
[691] What's different in your case, do you think?
[692] Oh, no, I've paid a price.
[693] Oh, I've certainly paid a price.
[694] Years ago, when I worked at UCLA, my first book came out in 2008, called Unprotected, and I challenged the political correctness of what was going on in that student health clinic.
[695] Oh, I paid a very heavy price.
[696] I was shunned.
[697] People who I thought were my friends stopped talking to me. after 11 years of very high, you know, positive annual reviews of my work, suddenly after my book came out, I got a negative review.
[698] And eventually I had to leave.
[699] I left because I became, I was marginalized.
[700] So why did you continue?
[701] Why didn't that stop you?
[702] I mean, look, people often apologize, right?
[703] They apologize and they backpedal.
[704] And you continued moving forward.
[705] despite the fact that you are facing substantial opposition for your views.
[706] Like, why do you, because this is rare.
[707] This is why I'm concentrating on it.
[708] You know, lots of psychiatrists and psychologists and counselors know perfectly well that the sorts of things that we've been discussing today are 100 % true.
[709] They know it, but they will not stand up and say it.
[710] Now, you did, and you got punished for it.
[711] Why didn't you apologize and quit?
[712] Okay.
[713] I think there are two reasons.
[714] I'm going to say, number one, is, that my parents were Holocaust survivors.
[715] And all of my grandparents, and a good bit of both sides of the family, were exterminated, were victims of the Holocaust.
[716] So I understand tyranny, and I understand lies, and I understand when dangerous people stand up and say falsehoods, and they are followed, out of fear and intimidation.
[717] I understand that too well.
[718] And I would say the other reason is that I'm a person of faith, deep faith, and I believe that there are eternal truths.
[719] And I believe that part of why I'm here in the world is to stand up in my small way when I can, to stand up for truth and to protect especially young people and their families from this terrible darkness of lies.
[720] Okay, okay.
[721] Well, that's a good place to end, Dr. Grossman, I would say.
[722] Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me on YouTube today and its associated platforms.
[723] For everybody watching and listening, Dr. Grossman, and I'll just remind you, has wrote a book called You're Teaching My Children What, back in 2009, and a new one coming out very soon, lost in Transnation, a child psychiatrist's guide out of the madness.
[724] She also appeared on Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman, which is where I encountered her work.
[725] I'm going to talk to Dr. Grossman for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
[726] Those of you who would like to hear the continuation of this conversation, slightly different direction are more than welcome to do so.
[727] show some support for the daily West Wire plus people who've also facilitated this conversation and many like it.
[728] For all of you who are watching and listening, your time and attention is not taken for granted.
[729] It's certainly appreciated.
[730] And to Dr. Grossman, well, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and for, well, telling all the stories you told to everybody who's listening.
[731] I'm sure there are many parents out there who are tearing their hair out in utter desperation, who desperately need something approximating the runes of a life raft to cling to, And at least you can provide some evidence that not every psychiatrist and counselor in the entire bloody country or the West, for that matter, has gone stark raving mad and become cowardly and delusional.
[732] And so much appreciated on that front.
[733] And I do think the tide is turning.
[734] The closure of the Tavistock Clinic in the UK is a big deal, especially given the bombshell revelations that emerged in the aftermath.
[735] And as you said, the Scandinavians and the Brits have adopted a much more sensible stance.
[736] and comparatively rapidly.
[737] And so I can't see that the U .S. and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, can withstand that for very long.
[738] So we'll pray, you know, that all this butchery and lies starts to come to an end relatively quickly.
[739] And then if it does, well, you've played some cardinal role in that.
[740] So hooray for that.
[741] Thank you.
[742] You bet.
[743] All right, everyone.
[744] We'll see you, well, on the next YouTube discussion or on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
[745] Ciao.
[746] Hello, everyone.
[747] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus .com.