287. Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality | Helen Joyce

[0] Hello, everyone.

[1] I'm here today with author and journalist Helen Joyce, her first book, Trans, When Ideology Meets Reality, was a Times of London bestseller in 2021.

[2] She is a longtime staff journalist at The Economist, where she has held various senior positions, including Britain editor, international editor, and finance editor.

[3] She is currently on leave of absence from the economist to work with Sex Matters, a new human rights organization campaigning for sex -based rights.

[4] Thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me, Helen.

[5] I've been reading your book over the last couple of days and found it, what would you call it, unfortunately compelling.

[6] That might be the right term, and this issue of the transsexual rights and all of the furor and upheaval around them seems in some odd way key to the malaise that is central to our times.

[7] And so people have asked me like they've asked you why I've bothered dealing with it at all since it's hypothetically doesn't affect me personally.

[8] But maybe we can start with that because at the beginning of your book you pointed out that, well, writing this wasn't exactly good for your reputation, let's say, certainly exposed you to the mad affections of the mob, let's say.

[9] But on the other hand, as we noted in your biography, you are a journalist, after all.

[10] So maybe we can start with your thoughts on why this book was necessary and timely.

[11] Well, first of all, thank you for having me on.

[12] It's really kind of you to talk to me about it.

[13] And I think unfortunately compelling is perhaps the best two -word description of my book I've heard yet.

[14] So why did I write it?

[15] I mean, I've been a journalist now for approaching 20 years, and I think a journalist, a short description, would be somebody who runs towards the burning building rather than away from it.

[16] So when you see something that's crazy, compelling, a moving story, big news, you shouldn't say, oh, this is going to be trouble, this is going to be difficult to write about, you should go, oh, tell me more.

[17] And then when you start to interview people and you get reactions of the sort that you've never had before, and, you know, for your listeners, I've been a foreign correspondent.

[18] I've worked in Brazil.

[19] I've written about paedophilia.

[20] I've written about the effects of pornography on teenagers' brains.

[21] I've interviewed murderers.

[22] I've interviewed presidents.

[23] And never before have I had the reaction that I had for this.

[24] Yeah.

[25] Well, that's also why I thought that, well, that's why I thought that opening with that background was so relevant, because you have this immense experience as a journalist, and you've covered all sorts of controversial issues, and yet you haven't been exposed to the kind of vitriol that this book attracted.

[26] And so I guess there's two questions about that.

[27] One is, why in the world would this be such a hot button issue, but also a hot button issue associated with that kind of mobbing and vitriol?

[28] And what technological transformations say social media related do you think might be also contributing to the fact that someone like you can be targeted so effectively for communicating now?

[29] Yeah, two really good questions.

[30] I think that one of the reasons that the vitriol is so intense on this subject is that it's so linguistic.

[31] You know, when you say that men can become women by saying that they're women, or vice versa, you're making a statement about language, not about reality.

[32] And in the postmodernist turn is precisely that turn in which the language takes precedence over the bedrock, material, itness of things.

[33] And so when somebody like me insists on talking about the reality that they see and refuses to use the words that are mandated, we're destroying the reality that people are trying to create.

[34] And since they see the reality that they're trying to create as something that is socially just, that they're trying to bring about a new Jerusalem, someone like me is doing a very bad thing and should be silenced by any means necessary, including by lying about me or, you know, threatening me or trying to get me out of my job and so on.

[35] And then your second question was about social media.

[36] So why, why now?

[37] And I think there's a lot of reasons.

[38] It's a sort of perfect storm thing.

[39] But we are witnessing a social contagion and that social contagion is carrying what I increasingly think of as a new religion, a neo -religion.

[40] And it wouldn't be able to spread without social media.

[41] And not just because social media is now in everybody's pockets, but because of specifics about social media, in particular, the censorship role that Silicon Valley firms take upon themselves.

[42] So I can't speak using the words that I regard as natural.

[43] If I do, I'll just lose my Twitter account straight away.

[44] I have to think about everything.

[45] I wouldn't know about such things.

[46] Yes, I know you wouldn't.

[47] Well, yeah, you have to be very careful.

[48] You have to use their language because that's the language now of Silicon Valley.

[49] And so it's very hard to say what I want to say using their language.

[50] Okay.

[51] So now you dived into the deepest part of this right off the bat.

[52] So I think we'll go, we'll talk about the idea that this is a linguistic battle and then we'll turn back to the technological front.

[53] So one of the things that I've been trying to think through, because I think we will go right down to the weeds in this to begin with, is the what seems to me to be the postmodern anti -enlightenment and anti -Judeo -Christian insistence that epistemology, which is the model of reality, let's say, that we use to guide ourselves, Trump's ontology, which is reality itself.

[54] And so the postmodernists insisted that the meaning of words could only be adjudicated in relationship to other words.

[55] And so they thought of the whole linguistic corpus as something like a massive dictionary where every word only bore meaning in relationship to other words, and really did attempt to deny or downplay the idea that there was an external transcendent reality, daistic or objective, that could serve as a corrective to these epistemological propositions.

[56] And I think that was driven in part by the underlying Marxist insistence that, let's say, power rules everything, but also that human beings are infinitely malleable and because of that can be molded and should be molded in the view of whoever happens to hold the utopian reins, let's say, and all of that's tangled together.

[57] And you also called this a neo -religion.

[58] And so that's why I'm bringing up all these additional factors, because I think they play into this religious, what's become a religious battle, essentially.

[59] And we should also talk about why you and I have both concluded, apparently, that this is best construed as a religious battle.

[60] Yeah, I mean, I agree with every word that you say.

[61] And in particular, I would say that the reason that this battle is being fought on women's bodies particularly, because if you want to say that sex isn't real and what people say about themselves is real, like formally that's symmetric, that should affect everybody.

[62] But actually it affects women because women's bodies are more exigent than men's.

[63] so we're the ones who carry the babies basically and I think that means that a large share of all women hit the bedrock reality of this is how we make new human beings and it's easier for men to ignore that fact easier for men to think of themselves as a ghost and a machine or as a little homunculus being carried around by a meat puppet as someone who could become immortal as someone who could you know cut the fleshly bonds or that you know we could start to wound transplants, all these things, like if you've had that experience of growing another human being and then having to get it out of you, you're just a much less, you're just much less amenable, shall we say, to these sorts of illusions.

[64] And so here in Britain, one of the major sites of resistance to all of this is Mum's Net, which has this reputation as being a site where you talk about, you know, what are the best diapers to buy or what's the best formula or, you know, is my husband being a jerk or whatever.

[65] But actually, it's also where women talk about this movement to turn the word woman into something that just means a feeling, a feeling that can be in a man's head.

[66] Okay, so a couple of ideas about that, three of them, I guess three ideas.

[67] The first is that my understanding of the anthropological literature in relationship to initiation rituals in anachronistic tribal communities, let's say, or primordial tribal communities, is that the initiation rituals for men are more severe, generally, than those for women.

[68] And one of the hypotheses about that is that, well, women run smack into biological reality, not least in the form of menstruation, but then definitely in the form of pregnancy and childbirth.

[69] And so they get initiated into the actuality of ontology, the bedrock reality, by nature, whereas that has to be done culturally with men.

[70] And so, and then the next thing is you said that women have to contend with biological reality in a way that men don't because of that.

[71] And that might be true, especially once a woman has been pregnant and had a child, which tends to grow people up in a very radical way.

[72] But it is also markedly the case that the people affected by this gender dysphoria epidemic happen to be young women and young boys.

[73] and so that's something that we could talk about.

[74] And, well, maybe we'll just leave it at that for the time being.

[75] Oh, yeah, sorry, the last thing was, you said that it's the reality of feminine existence that seems to be the place where this religious battleground is taking place, and then you tied the notion of reality to the necessity of reproduction.

[76] And that's actually a really good definition of what constitutes reality, and that is relevant to some of the, facts that you laid out in your book.

[77] So, for example, one of the facts is, these are biological and evolutionary facts, that sex emerged 1 .2 billion years ago.

[78] And so that's an awful long time ago.

[79] It's way before trees.

[80] It's way before many of the things that we regard as fundamental cardinal elements of reality.

[81] The brain evolved 500 million years ago and the cerebrum 200 million years ago.

[82] And what this means is that by the time we developed a central nervous system and were able to conceptualize at all, cognitively speaking, sex had been a biological reality for several hundred million years.

[83] And one of the things that bothered me about the compelled speech legislation in Canada that mandated that people use the pronouns of other people's choice was that I thought two things.

[84] I thought number one, that that was an assault on what might be the most fundamental perceptual category in the human cognitive lexicon and perceptual universe that are the entire way we envision reality has a sex -oriented underlying symbolic structure.

[85] And one of the consequences of introducing this mandated primacy of subjective identity would be the destruction of our ability to communicate and also the dissemination of a tremendous amount of confusion among impressionable young people.

[86] So I figured when the pronoun laws first came to existence that we would produce a psychogenic epidemic, which is exactly what happened, and that it would particularly affect young women because that's where psychogenic epidemics tend to originate if you look at the historical data.

[87] And that confusion, psychogenic and epidemic and inability to communicate has stemmed precisely from this deep philosophical or even, I would say, in some sense, even theological move.

[88] Now, does any of that seem to you to be stating the case too seriously?

[89] No, not at all.

[90] I would completely agree with everything that you said there.

[91] So I would say about the psychic epidemic that's playing out in teenage girls, we do see psychic epidemics in teenage girls first or worst.

[92] They're the people.

[93] who become anorexic.

[94] They're the people who self -harm.

[95] They're the people who went through these hysterical laughing episodes and so on, if you could look back historically speaking.

[96] I don't think anyone knows exactly why, but it's an observable fact at this point.

[97] But also...

[98] I know why.

[99] Oh, you know why.

[100] I can tell you why.

[101] Yeah, go on.

[102] Well, I know some of why.

[103] Well, look, when boys and girls are given personality tests before they hit puberty, there's not a lot of difference in average level of negative emotion experienced.

[104] But as soon as girls hit puberty, their proclivity to experience negative emotion so that shame and guilt and disappointment and fear and depression is elevated markedly in contrast to men.

[105] And it's permanently transformed at puberty and it stays stable for the rest of women's lives.

[106] And so women reliably experience more negative emotion than men on average.

[107] Now there's wide individual difference and there's some men who experience more negative emotion than women, but we're talking about.

[108] And what that means, at least in part, is that the people, almost all the people who experience the highest levels of negative emotion, and that would include self -consciousness and shame are female, and that kicks in at puberty.

[109] That's really interesting.

[110] Well, at puberty, too, kids have to restructure their identities in quite a major way, and that's especially true for girls, because they have, first of all, it happens to them earlier, right?

[111] So they're less mature when nature comes calling, let's say.

[112] Plus, as soon as puberty kicks in, they have these elevated levels of negative emotion.

[113] And one of the things we know, this is so interesting as far as I'm concerned, is that if terms that are reminiscent of self -consciousness load almost perfectly onto negative emotion.

[114] So there's almost no difference whatsoever between being self -conscious and experiencing guilt and shame and anxiety.

[115] And so if you add the stress of puberty and that physical transformation to the emotional transformation and then you take the extreme outliers on the negative emotion continuum, it's all women, it's all young women.

[116] And we know as well from the literature on gender dysphoria that the individuals who experience gender dysphoria, first of all, don't have suicidal ideation or the those sorts of symptoms any more highly than people who experience non -gender dysphoria psychiatric disorders.

[117] So it's a class of general psychiatric disorder.

[118] And if they're associated with negative emotion, that's going to mostly affect young women.

[119] That makes such sense.

[120] And they turn it onto their own bodies as well.

[121] Like the shame and the self -consciousness get turned onto their bodies.

[122] And in particular, their breasts.

[123] It's not by chance that they're cutting their breasts off.

[124] Like you put You put the bad into your breasts and you cut it off.

[125] Well, it is this self -consciousness at the body level.

[126] It's clear as well from the evolutionary research.

[127] So women evaluate men for physical attractiveness and sense of humor and intelligence and so forth, but they also evaluate them on the basis of either social status or perceived capability to gain productive social status.

[128] Men do not evaluate women for that.

[129] but they do evaluate them on the basis of their physical appearance and they look for signs of fecundity and youthfulness.

[130] And so women are judged more harshly by each other, by men and by biology itself, let's say, on the basis of their physical appearance.

[131] And so they have reason to be more self -conscious.

[132] And the reason they experience more negative emotion, as far as I can tell at puberty, I think there's three factors that contribute to that.

[133] One is you get physical dimorphism really emerging at puberty because boys get to be bigger than girls, and so that means if girls engage in physical combat with males, they're more likely to be hurt and hurt badly.

[134] And so they should be more afraid in those encounters, and they are.

[135] And then women are also more sexually vulnerable than men because they bear the burden of pregnancy and childbirth.

[136] And then also, and this is worth thinking about, as far as I can tell, is that there's no reason to assume that women's nervous systems are adapted to make women comfortable.

[137] They might be adapted to make women hypersensitive to the sensitivity of infants.

[138] And that'll make women more tuned to environmental dangers.

[139] And the cost of that is that women suffer more emotionally.

[140] So you could imagine that the female nervous system might be optimally tuned for the mother infant dyad and not for the mother herself.

[141] And then if you add to that, the fact that all of those factors tend to make women experience more negative emotion than men, and then that girls run into that young when they hit puberty, then they're casting about for an explanation for that misery, and if that's provided for them, to them by the context, then they can be susceptible to emotional contagion, and social contagion, anything that's associated with explanation for the negative emotion or any way out of it, like anorexia, like cutting, like body dysmorphia, they're going to be more susceptible to that sociological, to those sociological fads.

[142] That all sounds incredibly familiar.

[143] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[144] And they jump onto whatever is offered to them.

[145] And I would say about the trans -social contagion in particular, is it sold as a 100 % immediate solution.

[146] Like nobody tells an anorexic girl that we can just switch the anorexia off.

[147] But they do say to kids, if you're gender dysphoric, if you transition, magically you'll be better and that all your problems will be solved because your problems stem from not understanding that you're actually really a boy.

[148] And one other thing I would add, I'd be interested to hear if this resonates with you.

[149] Something that feminists have lamented really for decades is the way that unlike men, there's not very much age solidarity among women.

[150] So a young man may look at a middle -aged man or even an older man and say, that's what I'd like to be like.

[151] Whereas younger women, I've noticed this really personally.

[152] tend to almost despise that women pass the menopause.

[153] And I think a lot of what they're saying is that they don't want to become that person, that women don't want to become their mothers.

[154] Yeah, well, that's pretty awful, isn't it?

[155] And, well, I would say there's a couple of reasons for that.

[156] I mean, my wife has started a podcast series where she's interviewing older women who've had successful careers and families to have them lay out the course of their career and be rigorously truthful about it.

[157] I think part of the reason that, there's two reasons maybe that young women might have that attitude towards older women.

[158] And one is, I think that younger women are lied to almost all the time.

[159] And they're lied to partly by older women.

[160] I'm not going to put this on older women, because it's complicated.

[161] But younger women are told in no uncertain terms that the only important thing for them and what will be vital to their identity and what should be vital to their identity if their decent and honorable and ambitious young women is their career.

[162] And that's simply not true for most women.

[163] And it's also not true for most men, by the way.

[164] It's definitely true for a subset of men.

[165] But for most women, the optimal life, and I think most women discover this in their 30s, is a well -balanced aggregation of family, marriage, and career.

[166] And I'll tell you, Every time I've made that comment, people have clipped out, say, three minutes of me talking about that idea.

[167] I get the most vitriol comments that I've ever got when I've ever discussed anything, and all of them come from young women.

[168] And they're so vicious that it's actually beyond belief.

[169] And so that's an echo of what, and then, well, then the other thing is our entire culture has turned viciously against motherhood.

[170] We presume that if you're a moral agent, then you shouldn't bring any more rapacious human beings to expand the cancerous growth of humanity onto the planet.

[171] And that if you're a woman who wants to be a mother, then you're a second -rate citizen because you've subordinated your proper desire to have a career in the patriarchal world to this anachronistic birth machine mechanism that you don't want to be destined to.

[172] And all of that is pathological beyond comprehension, but it's also the situation that we happen to be in right now.

[173] And I think we devalue age, and in particular we devalue age in women.

[174] Like women, you know, women, once they're past the menopause are no longer seen as valuable because they're no longer beautiful and no longer potentially fertile.

[175] And I see the contradiction between that and to what you're saying, but I think both are true.

[176] And so young women don't like the thought that they're going to turn into older women.

[177] I mean, I remember, I was a young woman once.

[178] I think too, you know, that to the degree that we devalue family and continuity between generations, that also leaves the vital role of older women somewhat up in the air because one of the major roles that older women can play is as wise guides to younger women making their way through the complexities of career and family, and also to play out the role of supportive grandparent and to be there within that.

[179] family context.

[180] And if we devalue family, then we reduce people to their career and their individual attractiveness.

[181] And then if attractiveness on the sexual front is waning, that reduces it to career.

[182] And if the career isn't stellar, then what's the remaining signifier of value?

[183] And the answer is, well, very little.

[184] And that's a pretty damn dismal prospect for anybody who, anybody who's female who's moving through the world.

[185] So.

[186] Yeah, and you don't like to look forward and see that that's what's coming for you.

[187] So that makes it quite important not to listen to what older women say, you know, to parody what somebody like me says about, say, child safeguarding, like to mock it and to say things like, oh, won't someone think of the children?

[188] Well, yes, I do want to think of the children, thanks.

[189] You know, I am a mother.

[190] I think it's one of the most important things I do is think of the children.

[191] But that seems mockworthy to a lot of younger people and in particularly, strangely, to a lot of younger women.

[192] Well, you know, the other thing that seems to happen, I would say, too, is that the social media networks are set up so that casual, derogatory, derisive, narcissistic mocking is not only allowed, but staggeringly prevalent.

[193] And encouraged.

[194] It's not, well, that's it.

[195] That's it.

[196] It attracts attention and is encouraged.

[197] Now, you know, we have to talk during our conversation today about the role that narcissism plays in all of this.

[198] the mobbing, the derisive online comments, and the transsexual phenomenon itself, as well as this claim that subjective claims to identity trump everything, because there is no more signally narcissistic claim than that.

[199] I am who I say I am, and no one else has a say.

[200] It's like, well, really, in a marriage, let's say, you're just who you say you are.

[201] You don't have to negotiate your identity with your wife or husband.

[202] You never do that with your children.

[203] You never do that with your friends.

[204] they just go along with whatever game you want to play, every bloody second of your life, do they?

[205] And if they don't, that makes them evil predators and valid targets for derision and mocking, and worse than that, because as you know perfectly well, this online mobbing behavior that's driven by thoughtless narcissists not only is psychologically destabilizing because of its vitriolic quality, but also can certainly reach its tendrils into the confines of your job, let's say.

[206] It's become impossible for me to work as a psychotherapist.

[207] I had to leave my job at the university because it became impossible for me to function in both those domains.

[208] And so I would say this narcissism is also encouraged by, it's encouraged by educational institutions because they take young people in and they say, well, you know, your immature messianic desire to save the world, which could be admirable if channeled properly, should manifest itself in this vehement activism that puts you in position of ultimate moral authority over your seniors, let's say, instantly.

[209] And that's what you should be doing.

[210] And anyone who opposes that is, well, evil and predatory at best.

[211] And as a consequence, no punishment is too extreme.

[212] And alongside that, that you must choose your identity off a list of dozens and sometimes hundreds, like that require the most intense, constant rumination and self -examination.

[213] I mean, I was talking to somebody just yesterday who was telling me that a child who's 12 now, you know, has this check sheet for how do I feel.

[214] And this is a really happy child.

[215] But you're meant to be thinking all the time, like, how am I feeling right now?

[216] Am I, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy am I?

[217] How this am I?

[218] How that am I?

[219] How the other am I?

[220] This is all terribly bad idea.

[221] Well, it's clearly, it's clearly bad.

[222] Look, one of the things I learned when I was treating people who were socially anxious.

[223] I had a lot anxious people in my clinical practice, which is hardly surprising because that's the kind of suffering that requires people to seek clinical intervention.

[224] So socially anxious people, when they go into a new social situation, think obsessively about how others are thinking about them.

[225] Yes.

[226] And so then they become self -conscious, often about bodily issues.

[227] but not only that.

[228] They might become self -conscious about their lack of conversational ability and the fact that they're not very interesting and the fact that they're being evaluated by other people.

[229] It's a litany of obsessive thoughts and you can you might say, well, you could train people to stop thinking about themselves, but you can't stop people from thinking about something by telling them to stop thinking about something.

[230] But what you can train people to do is to think more about other people.

[231] And so one of the techniques that I used in the, My practice was, okay, now, when you go into a social situation next time, like we'd go through the niceties of introducing yourself and making sure they knew your name and get that ritualized so that it was practiced an expert and therefore not a source of anxiety.

[232] But the next thing is your job is to make the other person that you're talking to as comfortable as possible, to pay as much attention to them.

[233] And so we know that the more you think about yourself, this is literally true.

[234] there is no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable.

[235] They load on the same statistical axis.

[236] And so these kids that are constantly being tormented by 150 identities, so that's a front, not of freedom, but of utter chaos, and then asked to constantly reflect on their own state of emotional well -being and happiness is the surest route to the kind of misery that's going to open them up to, to psychogenic epidemics, let's say.

[237] The clinical data on that are clear.

[238] And then you land into that, the idea that you may have been led to believe that because you're a not very feminine girl or a not very masculine boy, that that means that really you are of the opposite sex.

[239] The fact is you're not, and no one around you is going to think that you are because you don't look like the opposite sex.

[240] And you become even more self -conscious, like self -consciousness brought you to this point.

[241] And now you're hyper aware that everyone around you doesn't think of yourself as the way that you've just presented yourself.

[242] And then you're watching for misgendering.

[243] And, you know, you're actually being told that it's a really terrible thing to do and that no one would do this unless they really hated you and they wanted you to die.

[244] Like they want you to disappear.

[245] They want trans people dead.

[246] They want them gone, you know?

[247] I mean, that's what people say about me that I want, you know, to cause a genocide of some sort.

[248] And I mean, like, when did I ever write such a thing?

[249] So what that is is it's the feeling that you've put all of your ability to care about yourself, understand yourself, define yourself, onto other people and how they're looking at you, and they're not looking at you right, they're looking at you funny.

[250] So you, you know, you are now out of control.

[251] Add to that mix, okay, so we could add a couple of other layers.

[252] So kids that are well socialized and popular develop that ability between the age of two and four.

[253] Right.

[254] And what they undergo this psychological transformation in identity.

[255] They go from a two -year -old egocentrism so that two -year -old can only play a game with him or herself.

[256] They can't play a shared game.

[257] And so two -year -olds will play in parallel, but they can't play a joint game.

[258] And that means that their identity, this is so important, their identity is purely subjectively defined.

[259] And they have temper tantrums if you interfere with that.

[260] Okay, now between two and four, Most kids extend their identity out into the communal world.

[261] And so one of the ways they do that is imagine two little kids between the age of, say, three and five play in house, a little boy and a little girl.

[262] The little boy will ask the little girl, do you want to play house?

[263] And she'll say yes.

[264] And so what that means now is they've established a joint identity for the time span of their play.

[265] And the joint identity is that they're both engaged in the same epistemological world.

[266] in the same conceptual world.

[267] And then they negotiate rules.

[268] Say, well, all be the daddy and you be the mummy.

[269] And they can flip that rule, by the way, and sometimes they will because they want to play out the other side.

[270] But generally they pick a sex -appropriate role for obvious reasons.

[271] And then having established the goal, so let's pretend about the household, which is a form of thought, they have to jointly establish an identity that's acceptable to each other.

[272] And then they have to do something even more sophisticated, which is they have to conduct themselves in those roles so that the game is fun, so that both people will keep playing, and so that both people want to keep playing with each other.

[273] Now, it doesn't take much thought to see that that's exactly, that's an analog and a prodroma to what you actually do as an adult when you enter a intimate relationship that's long term as you play house in the long run.

[274] But so what happens is between the age of two and four, your identity moves from egocentric and subjectively defined to communal and negotiated.

[275] And now this idea that we have that your identity is only what you say it is appeals not only to, I suppose, the ideologues that are pushing it, but it also appeals to people who are developmentally stuck.

[276] And I mean this in the deepest sense, are stuck at a two -year -old level of psychological development.

[277] And I think maybe there's a couple of reasons for that.

[278] You imagine a lot of kids are only kids now, so they're not socialized by their siblings.

[279] A lot of kids have older parents with lots of resources, so they're sheltered in a way that children never have been.

[280] And a lot of kids are exposed to computer screen.

[281] and TV screens at a very early age, so they don't have the opportunity to engage in the kind of dramatic play that helps them develop an extended social identity.

[282] And so it's possible on top of all this that we have an epidemic of narcissism that's being capitalized on by the woke ideologues who are also likely suffering from the same psychopathology.

[283] Yes, and so you see a lot of things together.

[284] you see a lot of different needs or weaknesses or pathologies that are playing out in sync with each other.

[285] And so these children, I really do think that they're victims, they're necessary victims of an ideology.

[286] So if you're an adult man who wishes to be seen as a woman, and the most important thing that you want is to have people believe that this is something innate, that people are born this way.

[287] And that means that there must be children who are trans.

[288] And it's not relevant to you whether or not that's actually the case for the individual children, the children of the sacrificial victims of the ideology.

[289] And so you've got adults who are using children as props for their description of who they are.

[290] Okay, so let's dive into that.

[291] So one of the things you do in your book is you detail out a lot of sexual fetishes, tracing them back a couple of hundred years.

[292] So imagine that you're a hyper -masculine male.

[293] Imagine you're a little narcissistic in your masculinity.

[294] And let's say there's a part of your psyche that regards that as unbalanced.

[295] And so what happens is you start to have fantasies about the value of the contrasexual temperamental virtues.

[296] And those would be the feminine ones.

[297] But given that you're not very conceptually sophisticated, maybe the way that counterbalancing tendency manifests itself in you is in fantasies of being female.

[298] And that fantasies are so damn deep that they actually involve even the sexual impulse.

[299] So Carl Jung, who I think thought more deeply about this than anyone else, believed that as we moved through life, and we expanded our personalities, that we would expand them beyond the confines of a rather stereotypical gender identity and incorporate the virtues of the sex that we weren't.

[300] So that would mean for women that they would become more emotionally stable and also more disagreeable as they got older.

[301] For men, it would mean that they became more emotionally vulnerable and more compassionate as they got older.

[302] At least they would extend their capability into those domains.

[303] And that was a necessary part of expansion and maturity.

[304] And then if that's forestalled by narcissism, let's say, or even by inability, then the proclivity to develop those contraceptual tendencies would start to manifest itself in the kinds of fantasies that you described as characteristic of the autogynophilic transsexuals.

[305] And so then if you think that narcissism is part of what's driving that, right?

[306] I'm pushing too hard in the direction that I'm going.

[307] And so these fantasies manifest in a compensatory way that you get a perfect storm.

[308] And it's the narcissists who are doing this that insist upon subjective identity and who also, by the way, are perfectly willing to sacrifice children to their own purposes.

[309] Absolutely.

[310] And two things that you notice when you look at these people are, one, what they're seeing when they look in the mirror is not what you're seeing.

[311] They're seeing a fantasy.

[312] They're seeing a fantastic version of themselves.

[313] But you, who are not in love with this idea, this idea of the feminine version of this man, you're seeing something a lot less flattering.

[314] And that's very hurtful to them.

[315] That's experienced, I think, as a psychic insult.

[316] That, you know, because it's like being flipped out of the fantasy.

[317] Like if you're in this beautiful fantasy and then someone laughs or someone calls you he, And then that's narcissistic rage is what you see as the response to that.

[318] That's right.

[319] That's right.

[320] And it's narcissistic rage at, in many ways, the same level that you'd see in a thwarted two -year -old.

[321] Yes, yes.

[322] And it feels like that when you're at the receiving end, I have to say.

[323] Yeah, well, that's for sure.

[324] I've done both.

[325] I've felt both.

[326] Well, right.

[327] And when you see these activists on this front melt down and have a tantrum, especially if you have a clinical eye or you've been a parent, you think, oh my God, like, that's exactly what two -year -olds do.

[328] And that's a hell of an early developmental level to be fixated at, you know.

[329] Two, that's really bad.

[330] That's really bad.

[331] That shows a real disjunction in psychological development.

[332] So it's no wonder this is felt as seriously affecting by the people who are affected.

[333] Because it's so deep.

[334] And it involves core issues of identity.

[335] And I think it must be felt very differently by a man who's looking at it like you and a woman like me, because it's not just that it's offensive that this man is doing what looks to me like a poor and very parodic imitation of a woman.

[336] It's also that I am expected to play along in a way that it really casts me as a supporting actress in my own life.

[337] And if I step out of role, the rage that this brings down is absolutely extraordinary.

[338] Like you're acceptable as a woman as long as you're going along with this.

[339] And then if you mention any tiny little bit of need that a woman might have, That just one vulnerability that a woman needs that really requires that all males are excluded from somewhere, all males, even the males who identify as women, it's as if you've done the worst thing that it's possible to do.

[340] It's like saying the two -year -old go to bed or brush your teeth or no, you can't have another biscuit.

[341] And it is.

[342] It's a meltdown.

[343] I presume it does feel dreadful to that person, but it's ugly to see it in an adult.

[344] Oh, I'm sure it does.

[345] Well, it's terrible.

[346] If you watch a two -year -old having a temper.

[347] tantrum carefully, and most people won't because they'll turn away because it's too disturbing.

[348] If you watch a two -year -old having a temper tantrum, one of the things you realize is that the overcoming of their developing ego by those internal systems of rage and distress is a catastrophic defeat for the beginning unity of the individual.

[349] And so then what you do, if you're a parent with any clue, is that you set up the environment so that tantrums are brought to a halt and eradicated in some sense as a form of acceptable behavior as rapidly as possible.

[350] And you don't do that by suppressing the child's capacity for anger or distress.

[351] You do that by integrating the capacity for distress and anger into a higher order personality.

[352] And so, and this, you said, you talked about this parody element.

[353] So let's go into that, because I've noticed this too, a lot of the behavior that I see on the part of people who are aping women, let's say, looks to me like a parody.

[354] And I think that part of the reason they get so mad at women who don't play along is because they also have this fantasy of women, femininity, as merely as passive, receptive, all -encompassing, you know, it's kind of the counterpart to the submission element that goes along with dominance and submission play that you often see more hyper -masculine men attracted to.

[355] And so I think that when women stand up for themselves, they also violate the image of docile and receptive femininity that plays such a major role in the fantasy life of the people who are engaged in, say, cross -dressing.

[356] So I think that's absolutely right.

[357] And I would add something else to that, which is that I think that both sexes do have a somewhat maybe idealized version of what it is to be a member of the opposite sex.

[358] And, you know, a man may have a fantasy version of what it, you know, just an ordinary.

[359] man, an ordinary heterosexual man who's happily married and has female friends, he may also just have some quite fantastical ideas about what it would be like to be a woman, like that, you know, you can lie back and let the man do the work, or that it must be lovely to be so fragrant all the time or something.

[360] You have these very superficial ideas of what it is to be a member of the opposite sex.

[361] And that's true, I have to say, in pornography as well.

[362] Like women as imagined by men in pornography You're nothing like real women, just like the men who are written by women in erotica are nothing like real men.

[363] And you see that too in these what looked to me like parodies, but I don't think they're intended to be parodies.

[364] They're not meant to be insulting.

[365] The man is describing what he sees.

[366] I wouldn't be so sure about that.

[367] I wouldn't be so sure about that.

[368] Well, because we also don't know to what degree the vitriol that's directed towards women that's a consequence of this narcissism is also a reflection of a genuine hatred.

[369] And this is why we should never forget just exactly what kind of radical and revolutionary genius Sigmund Freud really was.

[370] Because Freud put his finger on the key pathology of our time, even our time more than his, because he regarded the Oediple complex as the source of all pathology.

[371] And the Oedipal complex was essentially the catastrophic consequences of the non -judgmental, non -discriminating, hyper -compassionate, all -accepting maternal spirit.

[372] And so Freud's idea was something, and you can think about this biologically too, Freud's idea was something like this.

[373] So human beings are peculiar among animals, let's say.

[374] And there are two or three developmental reasons for this.

[375] First, we're born fetal.

[376] So because there's an arms race between the child's head circumference and the, and the carrying capacity of the female pelvis for purposes of birth.

[377] If the pelvis was any wider and the hole in the middle any wider, then females...

[378] We'd waddle everywhere, yeah.

[379] That's right, exactly.

[380] And so the way we've ironed that out over evolution is that babies are born far too young.

[381] They're born at nine months instead of two years, and their heads are compressible.

[382] And that's why the mortality rate for human babies is so high.

[383] It's a real narrow passage into life, let's say.

[384] Yes.

[385] Okay, and so what that means is that humans are hyper dependent, particularly for the first two years.

[386] But then, because we also have this amazing plastic, socially constructible brain, at least to some degree, we have this immense period of dependence.

[387] Now, the risk in that is that because we're so dependent, an excess of compassion is necessary, especially in the first six months because imagine the right response to a human infant under six months of age is you're 100 % correct about anything that distresses you 100 % of the time and your needs have to take priority over absolutely everything else and mothers have to be wired to provide that.

[388] Now the problem is so this is why the psychoanalysts they said the good mother necessarily fails And so the mother has this terrible conundrum.

[389] She has to be willing to sacrifice herself to this infant fully.

[390] But then as the infant matures, she has to sacrifice her own compassion and pull back and start to become harsh and more encouraging and demanding simultaneously.

[391] Now, if she has a man along with her, that's easier because it's easier for him to play that role.

[392] And that's a cardinal role that the masculine spirit plays.

[393] But Freud's point was, well, this protracted period of dependence exposes us to the terrible risk that we never emerge out of infancy.

[394] And the terrible devouring mother is a symbol of the person for whom compassion has become a hyper -dominant and devouring force.

[395] And that is precisely the political problem of our time.

[396] It's that this reflexive compassion that is now deemed, it's deemed morally necessary that it must govern everything.

[397] If you don't feel absolutely 100 % sorry for people as if they're infants, then you're a predator.

[398] And two things that I was thinking when you said that.

[399] One was that what I'm doing when I refuse to accept a man who says he's a woman as a woman, is I'm like the mother who's refusing to give the infant, he wants, which is really a wicked person.

[400] That's right.

[401] A predator.

[402] And so the rage is there.

[403] I'm stepping out of role for a woman.

[404] And I think the other one is the most enraging thing for anybody is to desperately want to be something that they can never be or to desperately want something that they can never have.

[405] And so, you know, a man who's got himself into this headspace where he can be a woman in his own mind, somebody who's.

[406] says no, and that no can be in one millionth of the world, it can just be in one place, it could just be in rape crisis centers, say, that's not good enough, that's not good enough, that is taking away the dream and being a very bad woman, stepping out of role for a woman.

[407] Well, especially for this hyper -idealized feminine, compassionate woman, right?

[408] It's all -encompassing and all -loving and all nurturing.

[409] And you see this again in two -year -olds.

[410] You know, I'm just watching this right now with my grandson.

[411] The most magic word, the magic word for two -year -olds is not please.

[412] The magic word for two -year -olds is no. Yes, they love it.

[413] I would say 20 % of the utterances of a two -year -old is no. And that's because no is the word you use to give yourself some space in some sense.

[414] And so two -year -olds don't like it when you say no to them.

[415] It makes them mad.

[416] and they push the boundaries as they should because they need to find where the boundaries are.

[417] That's what you should do when you're two.

[418] And if you haven't had those boundaries organized for you in a systematic way that enables you to expand your personality so that you can find alternative cooperative roots to adaptation and you just face this arbitrary no or you don't face it at all, then you're going to end up being a person for whom no is a, well, it has the same effect on you as it does on a recalcitrant two -year -old.

[419] It demolishes your entire emotional being the same way that no demolishes the world of a two -year -old.

[420] Yeah.

[421] I mean, and the strange thing, the very strange thing is that sometimes this is described as, you know, conservative or even libertarian values.

[422] So I just saw somebody here recently say, I'd like to see the conservative party here in England make the case for self -ID, the conservative case for self -ID, that it's not anybody else's business to tell you who you are.

[423] That's such rubbish.

[424] Exactly.

[425] Exactly.

[426] It's a total misinterpretation.

[427] Yes.

[428] Well, the idea that identity is subjectively defined is utterly preposterous.

[429] It doesn't apply.

[430] It doesn't apply in any situations where there's more than one person involved.

[431] And then this weird devolution of that idea, it's like, well, not only do you get to say exactly what you are.

[432] Now, first of all, we could talk about what you are.

[433] What?

[434] What?

[435] what you are means.

[436] But the second part of that is, and it depends on your feeling.

[437] Well, what is that feeling?

[438] Is that your moment to moment balance between positive and negative emotion?

[439] That's now the arbiter of reality itself.

[440] And then what are you?

[441] Well, the answer to the question, what are you, is it depends on the context.

[442] And we actually know this, personality researchers know this.

[443] So we all have a temperament that's partly biologically instantiated and partly socially constructed.

[444] But if you look at how much our innate temperament, measures of our innate temperament can be used to predict our behavior from situation to situation, it tops out at about 9 to 16%.

[445] So that means, and maybe 25 % in the case of IQ, which is the most powerful temperamental factor we know.

[446] Seventy -five percent of what determines your outcome, even on the cognitive front, is social context.

[447] And that means like the progressives claim to believe that about 80 % of your personality is socially negotiated, 80%.

[448] And so also what that means is imagine you're temperamentally extroverted.

[449] And so you want to talk like I do all the bloody time.

[450] I'm still going to shut up mostly in a funeral.

[451] Right, right.

[452] Right.

[453] Now, I might be the most talkative person at the funeral.

[454] Right?

[455] But I'm still going to use the context to regulate my behavior.

[456] And what that means is that the context actually defines my identity.

[457] And that's how it should be.

[458] That's what happens if you're a civilized person is the context defines your identity.

[459] Period.

[460] The end.

[461] Yeah.

[462] And the strange thing that layers on top of that is that not only are they saying that how you feel defines who you are, they're saying that it defines who you are that you're a woman or you're a man. When those are just about the most, you know, concrete things about us, the most non -negotiable things about us, the most bedrock things about us, like far more than our IQ.

[463] Well, they might be the most bedrock thing about us, right?

[464] Which maybe is why the culture war is centering on this issue.

[465] Because if it is a war between epistemology and ontology or between, let's say, narcissistic delusion and reality itself, then the battle devolves to identity on the grounds of sex, right?

[466] is, what did Freud say, biology is destiny.

[467] Yeah, and I mean, I don't believe that entirely.

[468] Well, it isn't true entirely.

[469] Well, on top of biology, we have, you know, we have got this civilization that we've built, and it's very, it's very anchored to biology, of course it is.

[470] But it is also, to some extent malleable, that we do co -negotiate it in different societies, to some extent on top of that.

[471] But then to have this idea that a man can say, I wish I was a woman, or I feel like I'm really a woman, or I think I'm a woman inside, which are things that only a man can say.

[472] I can't wish to be a woman.

[473] I can't feel like I should have been a woman.

[474] Those are things that are only possible for men.

[475] And then those things are meant to make you a woman.

[476] And then it's so detached from reality that there's no tether.

[477] It can go anywhere.

[478] Like this can just float off to anything at all.

[479] And that's why we see this weird proliferation of, you know, a poorer gender or somebody being gray sexual or something.

[480] It goes off into sort of almost stamp -collecting levels of precision and difference and so on.

[481] Well, there's another issue that comes up there, too, is so, and this is relevant to your claim, which is entirely warranted, that we vary on top of our biology.

[482] And so, for example, there is a lot of biological and socially constructed variance in temperament on top of biological sex.

[483] And so you could say without fear of error that a reasonable percentage of boys have a feminine temperament.

[484] And so that would mean they have more negative emotion, they're more compassionate, and they're more interested in people than in things.

[485] Those are the cardinal differences between the masculine and the feminine.

[486] And a non -trivial number of boys have those characteristics, just like a non -trivial number of girls are less compassionate and polite, So more competitive, let's say.

[487] They're more emotionally stable, and they're more interested in things.

[488] Now, those are relatively rare girls and relatively rare boys, but statistically, they're hardly, what would you say?

[489] They're hardly, they're not so rare that you don't see them all the time.

[490] It might be 10 % of boys are essentially feminine in their temperament, 10 % of girls, and that's a lot.

[491] And so that's at the level of temperament, which is really where gender, should be conceptualized because there are no good measures of gender.

[492] There are good measures of temperament and interest that differentiate men and women.

[493] Like if you use measures of temperament, including interest, you can reliably identify someone as a man or a woman about 80 % of the time, something like that.

[494] So you can do it 50 -50 on the basis of chance.

[495] And with the best measurements we have, you can get that up to 75, 25, or 80 -20.

[496] But that's certainly by no means perfect identification.

[497] And so one of the things that's perverse about this too, isn't it, is that despite the claims of the radicals that identity is socially constructed and variable, their fundamental notion is that if you have a variable temperament, so if you're a feminine boy, then what that means is that your biological reality is out of sync.

[498] Yes.

[499] Because the biology is so fundamentally important in that case, but never in any other case.

[500] Yes.

[501] Yes.

[502] It's so incoherent, man. It's unreal.

[503] It completely.

[504] And I mean, also, if we were to say, which would be a terrible thing to say, and I don't say it, if we were to say that this 10 or 20 % of boys who are actually, statistically speaking, more like the standard for girls, if we were to say, well, actually, they're really girls, that's not what we're seeing.

[505] There's no objective claim here.

[506] That would at least be semi -objective or be absolutely repulsive as well.

[507] They're just slightly out of the ordinary boys, you know.

[508] But it's the people who are claiming that a man can tell you he's a woman.

[509] or a woman can tell you she's a man, you know, there's no way you could say, you're actually just very like a man, so you can't be a woman.

[510] Like, in particular, he could be a rapist, which is the most masculine thing, you know.

[511] So we don't even say that a trans woman who commits rape, thereby demonstrates that this claim to be in some gendered way really a woman has been disproved.

[512] Yes, so in your book, you also talk about, oh, yes, so there's another element that's at work here too, And that is the trans transformations are also on the cutting edge of a transhumanism that's also aimed at the, in some sense, at the eradication of death itself, right?

[513] So there's another utopian dream that's sitting underneath this, which has its positive element, I would say, too, because we are trying to improve the length of our life and to rejuvenate ourselves.

[514] And there's an open question here is, well, how far can the transformations of our identity go?

[515] in an increasingly technological world, and how far should they go?

[516] And the transhumanist types, who believe, for example, that our consciousness could be uploaded into a computer and that we could be propagated forever, also have a proclivity to fall into the camp that says that your identity is only what you say it is, right?

[517] It's this sole idea that's independent of the body, and there's a wish in that to be free of the change and constraints of mortal existence.

[518] And you can understand that as well, but running away from something into fantasy is not the way to address it.

[519] I mean, it is a fantasy, isn't it?

[520] And it's a fantasy that's rather similar to being of the opposite sex, the fantasy that, you know, you can control death itself, that life and death are in your hands.

[521] It's the fantasy of being a god, not just being immortal, but being a god.

[522] And sometimes people express that as, you know, terribly light ways to talk about what are major operations.

[523] Like, anyone who's been through sex reassignment surgery, as it's called, although, of course, we can't actually reassign sex, will tell you that this was a major operation.

[524] And the question of how content you are with the outcome depends a lot on how realistic your ideas about it beforehand were.

[525] So if you're someone who's lived with gender dysphoria for many years and you do it, then it may actually just make you feel a bit better.

[526] But if you thought you could be turned into the opposite sex, you will be disappointed because these are, we are not made of meat Lego.

[527] I also don't think that the data that this actually makes people feel better is really very clear.

[528] I'm not sure at all that the tiny minority of people that we help, first of all, are truly helped.

[529] Because there's so much idiot ideology obscuring this and so much self -deception and narcissism on the part of the people who are doing it and undertaking it, that we don't have clear data.

[530] But what we bloody well do know is that a huge number of people who are doing this have been pulled into a psychogenic fad and then are undergoing unbelievably dangerous hormonal transformation because hormones are no joke.

[531] They are powerful physiological agents.

[532] And then the surgery itself is, well, the only way it could be more brutal in a fundamental sense is if it was done without anesthetic.

[533] right this is not some thing you waltz into for one day and and uh and then like it's a minor modification of some trivial element of your identity these are life -changing procedures i know i know exactly you know that you can go through the opposite sex puberty or that you know the the wilder reaches of the the trans lobby will talk about things like putting all children on puberty blockers until we grow up enough that we decide which puberty we want to undergo And, I mean, I was brought up Catholic.

[534] I'm no longer a believer at all.

[535] But I listen to this, and I just think that's demonic, actually.

[536] It's just an evil.

[537] That's a hell of the thing for an ex -Catholic to say.

[538] Yeah, but I don't you think so, to say that to children, to give children that idea.

[539] I think, you know, whosoever mislead one of these children, you know, it's the worst thing you can do.

[540] And they do all the time.

[541] Well, so, well, so let me ask you about this then.

[542] You know, one of the things that I have noticed is that people tend to come to religious convictions, not so much when they discover the nature of good, but when they discover the nature of evil and the reality of evil.

[543] And you call, you know, you described yourself as a lapsed Catholic, let's say, but you've been talking about the battle that's been happening right now in religious and theological terms, and I think that indicates the depth of the battle.

[544] And then also making the case that while the willingness to sacrifice children to the, dictates of a narcissistic ideology borders on the demonic.

[545] It's a pretty strong language for someone who's not religious.

[546] And so one of the things I've been concerned about is that when God dies to use the Nietzschean phrase, that, and we no longer attribute to God what is gods and attribute to Caesar, what is Caesar's, we start to attribute to Caesar what is gods.

[547] And that contaminates the political with the religious.

[548] And so I think that even if you're a secularist, you have to start to understand, you're sophisticated, that some elements of the axioms of perception and cognition themselves are so deep, they're so fundamental, that they're outside the realm of the political.

[549] They might even be outside the realm of the philosophical.

[550] They're down in the realm of the sacred.

[551] And that's true whether you're...

[552] Okay, okay, so why?

[553] Given your lapsed Catholic state, let's say, it's weird, right?

[554] because there's this, there's this ambivalence in your conceptualization.

[555] I don't, I don't feel an agnostic about this.

[556] Okay, okay, so I'd like to hear about that.

[557] So I don't describe myself as a lapsed Catholic because really I just don't believe at all anymore.

[558] But the reason I don't believe is that I don't think it's true.

[559] It's not because I can't feel the emotional and spiritual content of what's being said.

[560] It's that I think it's factually false.

[561] And maybe that just shows my lack of poetry and imagination as a human being, but I can't get past it anyway.

[562] However, I do think that there is something sacred in the creation of a new life by a couple and a mother who grows a baby for nine months.

[563] I've done it twice.

[564] It's not something that you could or should talk about in monetary or financial or economic terms or even in prosaic everyday terms.

[565] It's something extraordinary.

[566] It's a miracle.

[567] In secular terms, you've done something miraculous.

[568] And then children are such precious little things, you know, I feel that as a mother, I feel it as a sister of eight younger siblings and is now an aunt to 19 children, you know.

[569] It's not something that we should treat so lightly.

[570] And because I was brought up Catholic as an Irish Catholic, the language that I turn to, I have no other language to use for how seriously I take the wrong that is being done.

[571] Look, in my clinical practice, it was always the case that when I was dealing with the most fundamental catastrophes of people's lives, or the most profound experiences of their lives that the language would automatically become religious.

[572] And that was the case, even if the people that I was talking to were explicitly a religious or secularist.

[573] And the reason for that is that we actually have a domain of deep language.

[574] And when we fall into the domain of deep language, we're in the domain of the sacred.

[575] And I've been trying to think about that technically.

[576] So imagine this.

[577] You know, we have this notion of literary depth, right?

[578] Some stories are shallow, some stories are deep.

[579] Okay, and everyone feels that, and everyone pretty much accepts the fact that same with music, the same with beauty, any art form, there's shallow aspects and there are deep aspects.

[580] And deep aspects move you, and they move you deeply.

[581] So they have emotional residents, and they call to you as well, right?

[582] They call you to a better version of yourself.

[583] And part of the depth, so imagine that the deeper an idea is, is precisely proportionate to the of other ideas that depend on that idea.

[584] Right, and so then as we move down into the depths, and we start talking about, well, the category of sex, for example, or that stellar purity and attractiveness of children, which you really see, if you can see children, you're way down in the depths when you see that.

[585] That's how children reward you for having them, right?

[586] Is that there's such a responsibility and such a miracle at the same time, that the miracle of the relationship that you can have with them amply repays you for the responsibility if you can only see it.

[587] But then you have to go down into the depths and take that relationship as a sacred reality and ethical requirement.

[588] And yeah, you deal with those things casually at your great peril.

[589] And it's funny.

[590] I mean, I said that you don't use the language of economics about them.

[591] But, I mean, there is something I often think, and I say it in a jokey way, but I'm completely serious too.

[592] I mean, a child is the ultimate non -fungible good.

[593] So fungible things are the things that it doesn't matter which one it is.

[594] One piece of gold bullion is the same as another.

[595] One barrel of oil is the same as another.

[596] One child is not the same as another.

[597] And if you lose a child, you can't replace that child.

[598] So why is that?

[599] Why do we feel like that?

[600] Well, obviously, in my opinion, evolution gave it to us.

[601] A religious person might conceive of that differently.

[602] But the feeling is the same.

[603] And I find now in ways that before, I found this topic, I have fruitful and interesting to me, at least, conversations with religious people, because they take this seriously.

[604] To them, you know, they feel a sense of awe at God.

[605] Well, right, of awe.

[606] Well, what you see, I think, when you have a relationship with a child, your own child in particular, because you can see them most clearly in some real sense, is that you see the manifestation of the image of God.

[607] I mean, to me, it's evolution is the thing that did that.

[608] But evolution gives me that sense of awe, you know.

[609] It's not something you treat lightly.

[610] It's not something that isn't miraculous.

[611] And this seems like maybe we've gone off topic a lot, but I think it's why mothers and people who care about child protection are among the people who are most disturbed by what's happening here.

[612] because if you take children seriously, and if you take the task of creating a world in which little human beings can turn into healthy, whole, responsible, good adults who can live full, rounded, satisfying lives that are not just good for themselves, but good for the other people around them, you know, that's, again, I have to turn to the sacred language, like this is a sacred task, and to see people so willfully tell small children lies, like that you can be a either sex if you want or that sex is a spectrum or that we were assigned to sex at birth or that some people are non -binary or that if you, you know, if when you're seven you decide that you're really a boy, you'll just go on puberty blockers and take testosterone and there'll be a little operation and I feel livid at these people, really livid.

[613] Yeah, I feel exactly the same.

[614] Well, hence my banning from Twitter, let's say.

[615] And I've taken a lot of flack about that, you know, people tell me, well, you were so mean to Ellen Page.

[616] And I think, well, you know, Ellen Page is a star and she advertised her transformation and made the claim that this has revolutionized her life.

[617] And then she displayed her new body in a public forum and got 1 .7 million Instagram likes for it and probably enticed, well, let's say one young girl who's confused into becoming sterile, which is one too many for me, but it could be as many as what?

[618] A hundred?

[619] 500?

[620] A thousand?

[621] And I have my tendency to feel a hell of a lot more sorry for a set of confused, isolated, and lonely, pubescent girls who have no one to love them enough to help them appreciate who they are than I do for one overprivileged and unfortunately confused narcissistic Hollywood star.

[622] feel the same.

[623] I mean, I don't particularly want to say anything about Ellen Page.

[624] I think you've said enough.

[625] Enough.

[626] I wasn't going to say, I was going to say, you've said it clearly enough.

[627] I would just depersonalize it.

[628] And I would say that it's back to the narcissism, the focus on one person at the expense of everybody else.

[629] So that's one of the things that's most remarkable about this movement is, you know, there are many people who are suffering or underprivileged or vulnerable or indeed, like really, really, really hard done by.

[630] Like a colleague of mine, once said to me, why are we not talking about the ascedes?

[631] Why are we not talking about child abuse victims?

[632] Why is the suffering trans person or the untransitioned trans child the martyr figure of all?

[633] And almost a Christ -like martyr figure.

[634] Yeah, well, that's what we're trying to figure out, eh?

[635] Yeah.

[636] Yeah.

[637] So, and why if, you know, why is it as if to sort out that child's, like the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody to feel gender dysphoria?

[638] I think most people feel gender dysphoria in some respect.

[639] Why to sort that out?

[640] Will we sacrifice any number of other people and be angry?

[641] It's a form of narcissistic self -consciousness.

[642] I mean, and everyone does feel that for sure.

[643] And I think they feel that most acutely at puberty.

[644] I mean, people are, well, we know we're mortal.

[645] We know our flaws.

[646] We know we're going to die.

[647] We know we aren't canonical examples of our sex that we could be much better in a thousand ways than we are, we all have to bear that burden.

[648] And so that dysphoria, that's mortality dysphoria, and it can manifest itself in all sorts of ways.

[649] And that's part and parcel of the human condition, but to entice young people into assuming that radical surgical transformation is the sure cure for that is, well, I also believe that it borders on the demonic.

[650] I compared the people who are doing transformation surgery on minors to people who sacrifice children to Moloch.

[651] And I do see it in exactly the same way.

[652] The weird thing about having done that, you know, this is so strange too, is that almost all the comments I got for that article from the Telegraph and also on my YouTube channel, almost all of them were supportive.

[653] Way more than I thought there would be.

[654] And I thought, well, if everyone agree, that this is wrong, why the hell are we doing it?

[655] I mean, false consciousness.

[656] People believe that other people don't agree with them.

[657] I mean, that is one of the purpose of conversations like this is to show people that you can actually say these things.

[658] And I mean, it hasn't been easy for either you or me, and we have had significant blowback for it.

[659] Well, let's talk about that.

[660] I want to know, like I know what happened to me. When you wrote this book, what happened to you?

[661] I mean, not as much might have because my employer isn't a coward.

[662] So it turns out that you don't need very much bravery to stand up to these people because the viciousness gets worse if you give in in any way.

[663] Oh yeah.

[664] So yeah.

[665] You've seen that.

[666] You've seen that if somebody says something and then they apologize, they just come after you with her double ferocity.

[667] So I don't think that the editor of the economist agreed with me, at least at first, but she doesn't like bullies and she does like free speech.

[668] And so the first people tried to get me fired, she told them sharpish where to put it.

[669] Uh -huh.

[670] Okay.

[671] So you had employer support.

[672] Yes, employer support is very important.

[673] I often think about what happens to people in this social media age, and in particular those of us who talk on trans issues, but also those who talk on race issues as being the modern form of the pillory.

[674] So you're shamed, you're shamed rather than injured.

[675] You're not hanged or crucified.

[676] You're specifically shamed.

[677] that's the aim.

[678] And it's done in a way so as to maximise the fear that other people feel that they will also suffer the same fate.

[679] Because there's nothing they can do to help you if you're brought to the pillory.

[680] Like if a woman is brought to the pillory, let's just say a woman, because I'm a woman.

[681] Another woman could go and stand by her to show solidarity, but it wouldn't do her any good.

[682] She too would be shamed then.

[683] It would just mean that there were two outcasts instead of one.

[684] So then you think, like, what do you do to end the pillory?

[685] It's not mass solidarity, actually.

[686] It's, um, it's, it's, um, it's, It's powerful people.

[687] If you are under the protection of somebody with social capital, you wouldn't suffer this fate.

[688] This was for the outcasts.

[689] So it's actually the job of employers and institutions to stand up here.

[690] You mean rather than to censor, for example?

[691] Yes.

[692] And you don't have to say very much.

[693] Like Kathleen Stockson at University did eventually say some good things about free speech, but she had been going for three years and they had said nothing.

[694] If the first time they attacked her, the university had said very clearly, we support free speech, we support academic freedom, we do not tolerate attacks on our staff.

[695] I guarantee you the mob would have gone elsewhere straight away.

[696] Instead, it was made clear that she was available to be brought to the pillory.

[697] So I didn't have that.

[698] Okay, so then next question is, why do you think what has changed that has made our institutions so utterly cowardly in the face of the narwhide?

[699] narcissistic minority mob?

[700] Because something's changed.

[701] It wasn't like this 10 years ago.

[702] You could see it a bit.

[703] It certainly wasn't like this 20 years ago.

[704] So is it, do you think it, is it fundamentally the power that social media has brought to the, to the obsessively and narcissistically outraged minority?

[705] Or what do you think it is?

[706] Yeah, so I think that plays a part, but the thing is your employer can do the same thing about social media.

[707] They can just put out a short, statement saying, we stand by Helen Joyce or Kathleen Stocker, whoever it is, she's an excellent journalist or she's an excellent academic, move on, and they move on.

[708] They really do move on.

[709] So it's the fact that institutions haven't learned to deal with social media.

[710] They think they have to engage.

[711] I don't know why they do that.

[712] It's stupid.

[713] I've seen it repeatedly.

[714] Okay.

[715] So I have a hypothesis about that.

[716] Okay.

[717] You tell me what you think of this.

[718] Well, look, if you're a conservative type, you tend to be conscientious.

[719] And conscientious People tend to be guilt -prone because they want to be seen to do their duty and they want to do their duty.

[720] And so what that means is that if you're a narcissist and a mob of 30 torch -bearing neighbors show up on your doorstep and tell you that you're shameful, you don't care because you're a narcissist, you're low in conscientiousness, you're parasitic, you're disagreeable, you could care less what other people think.

[721] And so the mob has no effect on you.

[722] But if you're conscientious and 30 people show up, then you're going to be.

[723] to think, well, 30 people wouldn't be on my doorstep if I hadn't maybe done something wrong and I'm not perfect and so maybe I should scour my conscience and, you know, repent of my sins publicly because, well, why would I presume I'm right when I know I'm imperfect?

[724] That works really well on conscientious people.

[725] And now with social media networks, a mob from anywhere in the world can aggregate itself, and even if it's one person in a million who's annoyed at you, if a hundred million people are watching, then a hundred people can show up on your doorstep with torches and pitchforks.

[726] And so I think that this guilt targeting that the narcissistic psychopaths use in social media is particularly effective on decent, conservative, traditional people.

[727] And so they need to learn that we're not in Kansas anymore.

[728] Things are not the way they work.

[729] Yeah.

[730] You know, if you're prepared for it, if you know it's coming.

[731] So I think the economist, because it's very America focused, but it's still a very British publication, I think it had a couple of years notice that things were different.

[732] And so when these started, you know, they were prepared because it's how you, it's the first thing you do that's catastrophic.

[733] If you make a misstep on the very first thing, then it's very hard to regain it because they know that you'll give way.

[734] You've proved it.

[735] So they will never leave you alone.

[736] Yeah, well, I noticed for a while, I've been subscribing to the Economist forever, such a great magazine.

[737] And I noticed over the last six or seven years that an alarming degree of wokenness had crept into its hallowed hallways.

[738] And then I noticed about three years ago that the tide had turned and that people had woken up, so to speak, to some degree at the Economist and started to push back against a fair bit of this nonsense.

[739] And I was so relieved about that.

[740] And so I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's commensurate with your experience there, but thank God there are some institutions that still have the ability to stand up and say no, like a, like a firm and caring parent, let's say.

[741] I shouldn't really comment on my own employer who've been very good to me. So, you know, I still hold fast to some of those older values of discretion and loyalty and so on that are so easy for the modern identitarian narcissist to hijack and to use against you.

[742] So I think that's another thing that we're seeing.

[743] We're seeing the rise of the toxic underling, I call it in my mind.

[744] You know, we all know about what toxic bosses are like.

[745] Like a toxic boss can ruin everybody's experience in an entire workplace.

[746] But that's like a right -wing toxicity and that it's the toxicity that's enabled by authority, chain of command, loyalty, discretion, obedience, these values that are good and bad of the right -wing.

[747] And now you imagine you've got a toxic underling who's somebody who's completely convinced of their own rightness, who's junior, who's willing to tell any lies in the service of what they see as the greater good, who have no loyalty whatsoever, who think that the institution is irremediably sexist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, everythingphobic, and who think that it's their job to, you know, to fight from the bottom up.

[748] And then what I was going to say, the second thing that stands along social media as the enabling factor in all of this is the rise of the DEI industry, diversity, equity and inclusion.

[749] Oh, yes.

[750] And the thing is, if you were living in the old world, if we were still living in Kansas, that would not be too bad.

[751] Because yes, okay, we could have some more diversity.

[752] That'd be great.

[753] You know, equity is not a bad thing in itself.

[754] And I don't want to exclude anybody, of course.

[755] But we're not in Kansas.

[756] We're living in a new world where everything is upside down.

[757] And so within that world, DEI is weaponized.

[758] And it creates this toxic underlin phenomenon.

[759] whereby just some junior person can cause an entire organization to have a meltdown by claiming, you know, phobias of various sorts and by taking to social media to talk about it.

[760] And bosses don't feel like they can say, that's ridiculous, you know, out if you're going to talk about us like that.

[761] Because if they do, they'll be told that they're racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, everything else.

[762] Right, but you know, well, but there is an unbelievable amount of self -delusion.

[763] cowardice in that too, because you can say to those people, there was a rebellion at Penguin Random House when the news came out that they were going to publish my new book.

[764] Oh, I read about this.

[765] Beyond order.

[766] Yeah, yeah.

[767] And my daughter and I are a response to Penguin, was, hey, look, you got six or seven employees here in the greatest publishing house in the world, and they just told you they're perfectly willing to ban books they haven't read, and then have a meltdown about it.

[768] Hey, they just told you who you should fire.

[769] Why don't you fire them?

[770] And the answer was, well, we can't do that.

[771] It's like, well, not only can you do that, you are actually morally obliged to do that, because they showed you in the deepest possible way that their values, which were narcissistically sensorial, were at 100 % odds with yours.

[772] The trick is to not hire those people, like not even to have them come in and prove to you that they should never have been hired.

[773] And there have been a few really interesting articles about these meltdowns that I've read in the past few weeks.

[774] And there was a sort of a, just a couple of sentences that were by the by in one of them.

[775] And it was a lot of them employers, especially in Washington in the NGO and nonprofit and charitable sector, you know.

[776] And they were saying how they can get no work done anymore.

[777] But they just can do nothing.

[778] The entire organization is tied up in these interminable slack channeled conversations about, you know, how they need to rearrange everything.

[779] And they're not actually doing their charitable or their nonprofit mission anymore.

[780] They've stopped being mission -focused at all.

[781] And one of them said, we realized belatedly that we have suffered less than some other people because, and it didn't mention who it was, we have someone on staff who a year or two ago was caught up in one of these horrendous social media draggings.

[782] And so the social justice warriors won't apply to work here.

[783] So they were kind of inoculated against it.

[784] So I think that's the trick to work at how you don't hire these people.

[785] And I think it's by stating your values really, really clearly and that those values must be outward facing.

[786] They must be to do with your mission, that the mission comes first, and that everybody is expected to sign up.

[787] Well, that's also a reflection of the belief in that underlying ontological reality, right?

[788] We actually have a job to do.

[789] Yes.

[790] It's a job in the real world.

[791] And it's of paramount importance.

[792] And if you don't feel like that job is worth doing, then this isn't the job for you.

[793] All right, well, we're coming up at the end of our half hour, or hour and a half.

[794] I'm going to continue talking about these issues with Helen on the Daily Wire Plus channel.

[795] We're going to actually go into the details of the development of her career and expand that into a philosophical discussion.

[796] Hello, everyone.

[797] I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on Dailywireplus .com.