American Thought Leaders - After Cross-Sex Hormones and a Double Mastectomy, I Detransitioned: Laura Becker

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

“What I had been taught online and in high school was that this is actually a legitimate thought to have: Okay, maybe I should have been a gay man, maybe I’m trans.”As a teenager, Laura Becker lived in an abusive household and suffered from depression, social anxiety, and substance addiction. She became convinced that transitioning would cure her of her trauma.“It wasn’t framed to me as queer theory. When I was in middle school, like 14, it was framed as social justice. ... And I latched on to that immediately,” says Ms. Becker.By age 19, she had come out as a transgender gay man using they/them pronouns and was prescribed cross-sex hormones after a one-hour consultation with a gender clinician. One year later, she had both of her breasts removed. Today, at 26 years old, she regrets those decisions.“How do I exist as a female when I’ve mutilated my body? ... Like, what do I do now, because that didn’t work out? I didn’t transcend my body. I didn’t transcend the trauma,” says Ms. Becker. “I take responsibility for my delusions, but I don’t take responsibility for the medical neglect and the medical malpractice that occurred.”Laura Becker is now an advocate for detransitioners. She considers herself “pro-human” and encourages practicing “radical acceptance” of the “necessary imperfections” that we are all born with.“If we accept the burden of being alive, we must accept that there are necessary imperfections,” says Ms. Becker.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

What I had been taught online and in the high school was that maybe I should have been a gay man, maybe I'm trans. As a teenager, Laura Becker lived in an abusive household and suffered from depression, social anxiety, and substance addiction. She became convinced that transitioning would cure her of her trauma. It wasn't framed to me as queer theory. When I was in middle school, like 14. It was framed as social justice, and I latched onto that immediately. By age 19, she had come out as a transgender gay man using they-them pronouns and was prescribed cross-sex hormones after a one-hour consultation with a gender clinician. One year later, she had both of her breasts removed. Today, at 26 years old, she regrets those decisions.

How do I exist as a female when I've mutilated my body? Like, what do I do now? Because that didn't work out. I didn't transcend my body. I didn't transcend the trauma. I take responsibility for my delusions, but I don't take responsibility for the medical neglect and the medical malpractice that occurred. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.

Laura Becker, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you, Jan. I'm very happy to be here. You have an absolutely astonishing story. A lot of heartbreak and a lot of awesomeness is the term I want to use as well. We were talking a little bit offline about how suffering in our lives actually ends up being something important and informative and in some ways helpful. But why don't we just start with your story from the beginning? Yeah, so I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And all my childhood, I was, I guess you could call a little bit eccentric. I was a tomboy, very artistic, very sensitive.

And my childhood, the earlier part of it was, I would say, very successful. I think my parents did a very good job and I was very interested in academics and music and nature, animals. I have fond memories of that time and I think that kind of a bit crazy at puberty. And puberty for me was early. It was starting around nine or so. And I just wasn't developmentally ready for that. And so I started having a lot of social and emotional issues. And so at 11 11 when these problems were escalating I was taken to a child psychologist I was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum and I rejected that diagnosis because I didn't want to feel like there was something wrong with me because I felt like there was something wrong with with other people with my peers I felt like I could never really fit in with them. I felt like

they were a little bit stupid to be nice about it. Just a little shallow. I felt like I was seeing a different perspective of things and I was very misunderstood. And then around the same time, I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, PCOS. So I had cysts on my ovaries and that causes a lot of emotional and physical issues. It's linked to higher rates of depression and anxiety, fertility problems later in life, and weight gain, cystic acne. So I had a lot of those types of physical, you know, struggles going on and during middle school that's really not ideal. And social skills were very poor at the time. I just was, I felt alienated and I

felt like I couldn't, like there really wasn't a place for me. And so I just self-isolated. And then again, around the same time of middle school, around 11, I started experiencing psychological, emotional, and verbal abuse from a parent. And that just continued to escalate and become a chronic feature in my life after that. And so it was all of these things at one time during this very fragile state of development. So my self-esteem was pretty much destroyed. And you can only have such a self-concept when you've only lived like 10 years or 12 years. I developed an extremely negative self-image and also just negative view of the world,

because your parents are pretty much a god to you. That is all you know. And so I became extremely depressed, extremely nihilistic, had pervasive social anxiety. I was put on various pharmaceutical medications, antidepressants, birth control, but nothing ever really seemed to help. And I started developing suicide ideation starting at the age of around 14 and just intrusive suicidal thoughts, self-harming thoughts and overall just feeling quite hopeless. And so by the time I entered high school, you know, I had already kind of had developmental delays in terms of not really socializing very much and being emotionally immature. And that's when I got on Tumblr, a really amazing, you know, creative website. Kind of all the quirky people went on there and you could get into, you know, your kind of unique special interests, as they call it in the autistic community. Mine at the time where it was classic rock musicians. So at first it was really helpful

to my social development, but then that's when I found queer theory. And it wasn't framed to me as queer theory. When I was in middle school like 14 it was framed as social justice it was framed as feminism you know anti-racism and just pro-lgbt and I latched on to that immediately because I was very interested in you, these kind of abstract thoughts of identities and labels and introspection, personality theory. And that's when I started grasping onto the idea of being queer, because I'd always been non-conforming in my behavior, my clothing, and it felt like my personality just wasn't a feminine personality.

And I'd always had a very negative relationship to my body. And so I came out as genderqueer at first when I was about 15, and then it kind of started evolving into trans thoughts. What does that mean, genderqueer, exactly? I remember there's a book by that title, right? Yes, yes. So genderqueer falls under the non-binary gender identities. It essentially just means that your gender is weird.

It's subversive. The definition of queer is deconstruction know, deconstructionist subverting, you know, the normal, like whatever the normal is, it's the opposite. And so because I was androgynous, I didn't feel very feminine, but I also didn't feel very masculine. And I never related to, you know, the kind of normal, you know, straight boys. Like, I really didn't relate to them, but I didn't relate to girls either. So this was my way of saying, okay, I'm just, I'm just kind of weird, and I express my gender weirdly. And at first, it was really positive. I do want to emphasize that it can have benefits to kind of play with gender. It's a creative thing, like wearing really funky

clothes and experimenting with different hairstyles and just kind of all the normal teenage things. But because none of my trauma had been addressed, I had still these suicidal ideations. I started self-medicating with marijuana, alcohol, various pills, as well as still the prescription medications that weren't really helping but kind of numbing things to some extent. And so my gender-related issues, the issues with my body, self-acceptance, and my sexuality just continued to get worse. And I was very confused because I was always very attracted to men, and I struggled romantically, as one does when they're pretty weird. And so I was confused because I was somewhat dressing like a butch lesbian, and yet I was completely heterosexual. And so I felt even

more, you know, sexually or romantically worthless. Straight men would not be attracted to me. And I mean, it wasn't wrong, right? They weren't attracted to me at that mean it wasn't wrong right they weren't attracted to me at that time and so I started becoming friends with gay men more androgynous creative theater types of people in high school and they you know felt like my. We were all kind of funny and witty. And I started to become very confused. You know, maybe I'm supposed to be a gay man. And, you know, maybe like a couple decades ago, that would seem, you know, irrational and absurd and delusional. But what I had been taught online and in the high school was that that is actually a legitimate thought to have. Okay, maybe I should have been a gay man, maybe I'm trans. And I started to ruminate on the trans identity and my body and genitalia. at the same time I was having these you

know unrequited obsessions situationships with these friends of mine who were confused about their sexuality and they kind of emotionally and physically used me to realize that they were gay men and that was very devastating to me because of course due to the parental rejection and abuse, I completely internalized this as, you know, my fault. And I struggled to, you know, accept that it's not my fault, that I'm just a female and that they're gay and it's not like a personal choice. I didn't know this at the time, but I had complex PTSD. So my brain was actually wired to respond to the abuse all the time.

And so it was a really scary time. I was often very afraid. I was completely afraid to be alone with my thoughts. And yet around others, I still felt rejection. And I was still kind of being used by these these my best friends and so if it's my fault and it's based in gender and I have gender issues then I must have gender dysphoria and if I have gender dysphoria that means I'm trans and if I'm trans you know damn you know you know, that's not a good thing.

You don't want to be trans because we're told that society, you know, hates these people, the evil conservative Christian right, you know, wants to kill us out of existence, exterminate us, as well as it's very hard to date and have loving relationships. And so I didn't want to be trans. Like, I was very skeptical of it because I was very nihilistic, so I didn't really believe in anything. But I was presented with this idea of being trans as basically the only option for me. And when I was

18 I went to a liberal arts university. I socially came out as a transgender gay man and wanted to use they them pronouns. Then at 19 I had a sexology professor at college who was a female to male trans person. And I was venting to her about my pain. And she told me that I could go to Chicago, get basically free or very low cost testosterone. I went to this clinic, it was an LGBT clinic, about a one hour appointment.

As autistic people do, I basically just trauma dumped all my pain, told them everything and they were like, it sounds like you really, really need help. You really need to take this, these hormones. So they gave me a prescription that day and sent me on my way. After a one-hour consultation. Yeah. And knowing that you had all of these suicidal thoughts, everything else. Yes. And at the time, I'm thinking, oh, I feel so seen, so respected in my identity because I can access this. getting a very high dose of testosterone that I had truly really no deep, clear understanding of how the negative effects it could have. All I cared about was, you know, developing facial hair, having a beard. You know, I was overweight, which is a symptom of polycystic ovary syndrome. And I was like, OK, we're going to have fat redistribution, you know, more muscle.

You know, these are the things I'm thinking about. There's all these cosmetic, you know, fantasy changes versus the actual effects that I later experienced when I was on it, which were, you know, severe aggression, severe sexual aggression, impulsivity, recklessness, anger, and unfortunately, because I was doing so badly at the time when I was prescribed these hormones, very shortly after, I admitted myself inpatient for suicide ideation. That was the third time that I'd done that. And I just turned 20. And when you go to the hospital inpatient, you know, it's a very different world. It's very articulate of, you know, I have a problem and there needs to be intervention.

And so I came out of there with this renewed sense of determination to help myself. And what I had been taught was that if you're trans, what you need to do to help yourself is to have surgery, is to further transition and not listen to, you know, any doubts that you're going to be rejected or that that's not your true self. And so right as I got out of the psychiatric ward, I booked a double mastectomy consultation. And six months months later I had my breasts removed and I Told the surgeon that day that I was feeling suicidal because Because of the testosterone I had a mental breakdown

very shortly before the surgery was scheduled and some more traumatic events had occurred and the surgeon said well you know is it related to the surgery that you're feeling suicidal and I said no it's related to these other things and the reality was that the surgery was very much related to the suicidal ideation. The hormones, the, you know, fantasy identity that I had as a gay man, all of that was just a cry for help and and unfortunately I I lost my normal female body forever because of that and I was so so scared after the surgery of the effects of testosterone that I went off of it cold turkey and I said when I become more stable I'll go back on and finish the physical process but as things continued to get

worse there was there was more traumas there was a lot of heavy drug use, self-medicating, just trying to survive through just all these years of turmoil in my brain and my body. I, at 22, two years after the surgery, said, either I'm going to kill myself, either I'm going to actually do it, or I'm just going to keep avoiding living and taking responsibility for bettering my life. Because suicide ideation is another escapist tool. And I deliberated about it for months, took a semester off of college, just meditated and decided that I was too afraid to try to die by suicide, and that I would try to seek help. So I got an official, full psychological evaluation, and that's when I was finally officially diagnosed with PTSD.

And when I was diagnosed with PTSD, everything started to make sense, because I realized that it wasn't this something inherently wrong about me or that I was inherently worthless, but really that my environment had been abusive and I was reacting to that, that kind of extreme existential awakening led me to being able to just kind of release some of my other illusions and that's when I detransitioned because I realized that I was never a gay man or non-binary. I was just a very traumatized girl. And no one wants to be a traumatized girl.

I mean, what a story. And even just kind of trying to digest it all here, I get this sense of a very complicated relationship with responsibility. Because there's all these different actors. There's the surgeon. There's the parents, there's the psychologist, psychiatrist, the people that say yes, go on your gender-affirming journey. How do you square your choices, your behavior? The parent puts all the responsibility of the negative things in their life onto the child. And so that's a pretty clear example of when you can determine that the child was not responsible. The child is not responsible for an adult, especially a parent. In terms of my life choices, I take responsibility, I take full responsibility for all of the negative coping mechanisms that I did. But that doesn't mean that I

was a complete failure or like I look at it as I was surviving and I survived in ways that hurt me and other people and I regret that and I have still a lot of grief about that and the transition the drug use the relationships but I was also doing the best that I could to survive. And that's just what being human is. You know, people who dismiss detransition whistleblowers, they'll always say, why don't you take some responsibility for your choices? That's your fault. You were just stupid or you were selfish or you were manipulating the doctors. People say that? Very often. That's pretty much their very first go-to is, well, this just didn't work out for you and now you're blaming everyone else. Why don't you grow up and just admit that you were wrong personally?

And, you know, I've had to grapple with that sort of accusation from other from random strangers, but also from myself and my my guilt and shame. And what I've concluded is that I was going to professionals for help. I had a problem that I took responsibility over at the time and said, there's something wrong with me. I need help. Then I went to the people who were supposed to provide that help, and I was not helped. And so I take responsibility for my delusions, but I don't take responsibility for the medical neglect and the medical malpractice that occurred. And I've since realized that this is not just me this is hundreds of other people children young adults who experienced the same thing so it's not

just me it's a systemic institutional concern that these doctors are not providing proper health care for gender issues. They're not trauma-informed when they're providing this care. And it's become a patient-led system of health care instead of an expert doctor saying, okay, these are our options. Here's what I think would work best for you. Can we work that out? Instead, it's the patient goes in and says, I think this is wrong with me. The doctor says, okay, here are your drugs. And in this case, I was given cosmetic surgery. I had my breasts removed and my nipples carved into ovular shapes and grafted back on, huge scars across my chest to treat my depression. Let me ask a few questions.

One of them is you said you went off testosterone cold turkey. I'm under the impression that is a really difficult thing to do. Can you just tell me about what happened? Yeah. So I was immediately started on an extremely high dose. I wasn't tapered on, you know, as other prescription drugs are done by doctors. I was just immediately started on 250 milligrams of testosterone injected weekly as a five'2 female with hormonal issues. And then I was told to go off of that dose for the surgery by the surgeon. But I didn't have anyone overseeing my care. And I was very immature. I mean, I had no idea how insurance worked. I was a person who wasn't even showering or brushing my teeth on any sort of regular basis.

Like, I was very incompetent. And so then I just went cold turkey off of that very high dose. what happened as a mental breakdown because I lost control of my rational thinking. I was extremely reckless, aggressive. I got into a fight at my job and just walked off, just stormed off of the job over a minor disagreement. And I got into interpersonal conflict that resulted in losing my entire friend group. And so right as I was going into the surgery, I had just lost everyone that mattered to me in my life. The only people I had in my life were my parents, who I did not have a good relationship with. And so of course I was feeling suicidal the day of the surgery. And then after, I was so terrified by how aggressive and out of, I just felt out of control physically. A couple months before on the testosterone, I got into, I was doing a lot of behaviors like speeding,

just like aggressive driving, cutting people off. And I got into a car accident and I got into a verbal altercation with a police officer. And that altercation happened immediately after I just had my mastectomy consultation. I was driving from the consultation back home to my house when I got into a severe, you know, emotionally hijacked state of aggression towards the police officer who threatened to give me a disorderly conduct ticket. And so that was literally the mindset I was in when I was approved to get my breasts removed.

And it's just like you really can't make this sort of stuff up. It's just it's it was so obvious that I was mentally unwell and unable to to function. And yet it just kind of all played out. And unfortunately, other people were hurt in the process, too. You said I detransitioned. It sort of sounds, you know, there's probably a few steps involved. So detransitioning I view as just accepting your biological sex. And the steps involved would be acknowledging that you made decisions decisions that have now left you unhelped and unhappy. And so for me, it was mostly psychological because I had taken a break from the testosterone because I was so to find a feminist on Tumblr who saw me venting about it online, and she added me to a private, small Facebook group for detransitioned women.

And maybe there was 30, 40 of us. Every single one had extensive trauma. We were all just traumatized women. Most of them were lesbians, but all of us were just gender non-conforming, a lot of autistic women. And so that then began the social process of detransitioning, which is to start to refer to yourself again by sex-based pronouns, no longer using they them, no longer calling yourself a trans person, but just calling yourself a female. And for me, it was a very, very slow walk of shame. Here and there, my family would say, hey are you still, you know, calling yourself trans? And I'd be like, no. It was very embarrassing to, and shameful to, be in this kind of limbo-like state of being like, how, how do I exist as a female when I've mutilated my body. Now what? Like, what do I do now? Because that

didn't work out. I didn't transcend my body. I didn't transcend the trauma. I feel like my life really began when I got my PTSD understanding because I was finally able to say, oh, I've been in a dissociated survival state that wasn't really me. Okay, now I have to go about healing a decade plus worth of PTSD as well as moving on with my life. So yeah, there were a lot of steps involved in that. You know, with this event that we've been at together the last couple of days, we often talk about kids being transitioned because that's kind of, frankly, beyond the pale, right? How can a kid make a decision like that for themselves? This is one of the things that comes through.

But you're doing all of this as an adult, right? So how does that change the equation? I mean, I think that it's just so blatantly obvious that children cannot consent to permanent medicalization in these ways, that only someone who is completely brainwashed or evil, anti-human, would be able to say that they could. For an adult, it's more of a gray area, because myself and many other kind of, you know, open-minded people, we very much respect bodily autonomy and liberty to make those decisions. And so that involves a very individualized personal look at this individual.

What issues are they having, and then what is the path of least resistance to help that person live a better life. And there isn't a one-size-fits-all, but I don't think that harm has ever been done in the history of human existence to radically accept one situation. It doesn't mean not feeling pain, it doesn't mean not making an attempt to change something, but accepting without resisting the pain or the emotions, just sitting in your body with the reality of your situation, that has never

harmed anyone. And yet that is not being offered to adults who are at least mature enough typically to understand what that might mean. A child doesn't really understand stoicism, maybe, as well. But an adult has some function to understand higher concepts. And we should be offering that collectively in medicine and mental health care to adults of any age, regardless of what their symptoms are, and doing the least invasive medical procedures possible. And so I would say, yes, I was an adult. Yes, I had more ability to make decisions and more responsibility than a child. However, was I in a stable state to make those and consent to those medical decisions?

And was I given truly informed care that gave me the best, most comprehensive options for treating my distress? Absolutely not. And so it's not this black or white thing where it's like, children, no, adults, do whatever they want. But in a way, it's the same option. It's very interesting what you said. You want to be able to know what are the least invasive options that exist, and what do those mean? But that's not how all this is being framed, right? For people, you even mentioned the concept of gender or identity questioning, and there's a kind of a one, a train. It's kind of like jumping from A to Z. And there's all these other possible explanations

or routes of treatment, but if you say trans or gender, A to Z, okay, get them on all, every, the most invasive combination of surgeries, hormones, drugs, affirmation only without considering anything else. It seems to me like you have this very intensely personal journey. I basically feel like I transitioned alone and I detransitioned alone. And it really is only in the last two to three years of my life that I feel secure in the fact that I have real friends and real allies and real community. And especially in the last year of my age, 26 to now now 27, like my social skills are really good now. And actually, it was Stella O'Malley who was really the first person who who saw me and understood and helped me as a mentor when I was 23. And it only takes one person who can tell you the truth about yourself and help you realize the truth about yourself and help you to feel safe to trust other people and

yet also discern who is safe to trust and who isn't. Like this last year, I'm just so filled with gratitude. I know I just said this really depressing story and only talked about the negative things of my life, but I've never felt more love in my life than I have now, ever. And I'm really glad that I didn't give up on myself and I didn't give up on other people even though I wanted to every day for so many years because now I feel confident that I can take on the burden and responsibility of existence and my weird stuff

and able to make the most of it and share it, truly share it with others and have true intimacy and love. You know, it goes back to something I said at the beginning, which was sometimes it takes an incredible amount of suffering to get to the other side, but there's something there. And in fact, it can be kind of wonderful. But man, the road, I mean, it's hard to fathom all. I like the Jordan Peterson metaphor of burning away the dead wood of the soul. You know, forests and plains naturally have wildfires that burn away everything,

and that's extremely painful when you're in that death phase. But then in the rebirth phase, there's a transition back to you know all these nutrients back into the soil and you know things are cultivated and once you get back into the life phase you realize that it was all necessary in order to just tweak you a little bit each cycle into a higher version of self, into a more stable, strong, confident, self-assured person and member of the greater community. You know, one of the things I noted that you have this, what you call the detransitioners appeal for accepting sex roles, right?

And so tell me about that. In that essay and kind of my general approach to things and becoming more conservative philosophically is to say that, you know, we have a human condition. We have evolved, that, you know, any stereotype is inaccurate and not even just inaccurate, but evil or bigoted. And so my kind of appeal is that if we accept the burden of being alive, we must accept that there are necessary imperfections that we are. You know, for example, having a womb, having menstruation every month, having this potential for impregnation and childbearing and raising a child, you know, I used to view that as nothing but a fearful, a scary, overwhelming, um, burden, a burden perhaps. And, um, now because I've been

able to accept my body for what it is in a neutral way, it's not a moral judgment to say that women's bodies are built for giving birth. That's a neutral, that isn't a moral or social judgment. And women can choose to do what they wish with their lives but if we accept the natural gifts and potential that we have such as my ability to create life then it might go a little easier and so this is my kind of complicated way of saying that sex or try to make males or females the same or that femininity is bad or masculinity is bad. Both of those are very immature and unwise approaches.

As I obviously have just described, my story was a very unwise approach to not respect my female biology. And now that I respect it, even though it sucks sometimes, and maybe I don't always want to have baby fever, for lack of a better term, or sexual impulses, sexual drives or whatever. You know, it's necessary to existence. And if we accept what is necessary to existence, we can find true meaning in existence. You know, so I want to go back again to the beginning a little bit here because you mentioned that the thing that you found was queer theory in

the guise of social justice and the guise of something else. And it's very, I've also been on a journey trying to understand how all this works. And queer theory kind of comes out kind of front and center as a, you know, really important organizing system around all of this stuff. So tell me about what you've learned, because that's not necessarily obvious. Right, so queer theory is a set of various ideologies that basically want to deconstruct what is normal, that normal doesn't exist.

It's this philosophical belief structure that, you know, human beings can determine their own sense of reality. It's a Gnostic belief, which means that, you know, Gnosticism is a way of like particular knowing. It's subjective knowing that you can have secret knowledge about reality that no one else has and anything prescribed by society or culture doesn't matter because there's some kind of a soul-like, you know, sense of self that is transcendent and higher and more important than the body. And that can be very confusing. But essentially what I've gleaned from that is to understand that there are people that are saying that anything traditionally normal, being a male or a female, having children, and reproducing the species, what we might consider to be pro-humanist, is an illusion.

And the only thing that truly exists are the subjective perceptions that we have and again Jordan Peterson has been extremely helpful to me in understanding my proclivity towards nihilism and then defeating that because when he says that at the end of the day maybe nothing seems real but a nihilist can't deny that pain is real and And at the very core of things, when I'm going through my flashbacks and feeling suicidal, something is real. That pain that I'm in is real. And so if that's real, and we can agree on that, then certainly other things must be real and not just subjective. And that has been the springing board that's helped me to accept that

there is a sense of good and a sense of evil. Good in my interpretation being generative, creative, abundant, building upon what exists Evil being Destructive And destroying what exists For the sake of just destroying it And that's what queer theory is It is destroying for the sake of destroying it Anything normal

Anything normal or good Like this is now to the point where You know There's people saying that intercourse is rape. Like the thing that creates life is rape and that's evil and that's bad. And having children is evil and having children is selfish and bad. And if we can't even agree that it is good to reproduce the species and to create and cultivate new life, then what do we have left but to just hedonistically and confusedly be interested in these

concepts and these labels and identities and get into transhumanist, you know, ideas of destroying the human body and I think we have more than that left because I at least I feel confident about my ability to do the ultimate creative act as an artist which is to combine my DNA with someone that I love and that is good and to create another being out of that. As we finish up, it's very interesting that you equate this whole trans movement with a transhumanist movement. This is something Jennifer Bilek has talked about quite extensively. You believe that this is sort of inherently a kind of a nihilistic view of the world. Do I understand that correctly?

Yes, I very much agree with Jennifer Billick, and I agree with a lot of James Lindsay's analysis that there's various, you know, large-scale sort of systemic, the institutions of medicine, technology, academia that want, that are influencing and brainwashing people to be nihilistic and to be working against their own interests which is again anti-human interests and maybe people have different motives for that whether it be power control money sex but I really believe that fundamentally we have a existential crisis going on right now, as James Lindsay understands it. A lot of this ideology comes from queer theory, which comes from postmodernist

theory, which comes from Marxist communist ideology, which essentially is a very small number of elite, rich, powerful individuals having all the resources and power and convincing the masses that that is what's best for them is to have nothing and be happy about it. And it feels like that is a danger that we're pushing up against now. And yet we have so much abundance that it can sometimes be difficult to see that. What I hear from you is a very positive outlook, despite some of the kind of harsh realities you just mentioned and your own, you know, extremely difficult journey. And it's kind of I guess it's a little bit inspiring, I could say. A final thought as we finish? So I think that, again, this is a perpetual unraveling of self-discovery and just consistent learning and meaning-making over my life. Again, as Jordan Peterson says, accepting the adventure of your life. And so my final kind of message to everyone but also especially to

young adults and teenagers who are overwhelmed is that it's okay to be human. It is okay to be an infallible creature. It is okay to exist and be flawed, to be peculiar, to be weird, as I say, to be funky, to be offbeat. And if we practice being truthful to ourselves and others with vulnerability and radical honesty, we will all mirror each other and see that all of us are experiencing that same overwhelm, that same confusion, that same fear of just being ourselves and existing. And if we can just agree, it's pretty weird to exist. It's pretty weird to be human. Now we've just cleared so many of our problems

and we can move forward to authentically search for good and then create and share good with others. Well, Laura Becker, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. It's been great. Thank you all for joining Laura Becker and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.