Factually! with Adam Conover - Trans Misconceptions, the Military and Space Force w/ Brynn Tannehill

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

Brynn Tannehill, former naval aviator, Senior Defense Analyst, leading trans activist and author of "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans* joins Adam this week to discuss trans and gender identity problems in the military, her journey with gender dysphoria, misconceptions about trans issues, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. My name is Adam Conover and we certainly live in a time of increased visibility for trans Americans. This is a total cultural transformation that we're living through right now. There are transgender TV stars, there's a transgender judge on the Alameda Superior Court right here in California, and far more Americans, myself included, know or are close with a trans person than just a few years ago. The progress is real, the progress is positive, but it's also deceptive. An Ipsos poll found that 71% of Americans believe America is becoming more

tolerant of transgender people, which is fantastic. But the same poll also found that over a third of Americans think that, quote, society has gone too far in allowing people to dress and live as one sex even though they were born another. And that percentage was higher in the U.S. than every other country in the poll. And among the general public, misinformation is rife about these issues, with many Americans only having a shaky understanding of what being trans even means. We've also seen a serious political pushback, with transphobic bathroom bills like the one that passed in North Carolina that was aimed at preventing trans people from using bathrooms that match their

gender identity. And now that bill was repealed, but unfortunately, the battle is far from over. Recently, there has been another huge barrier to progress in the Trump administration's severe restrictions to trans service members serving openly. And this is especially devastating because in 2016, the military itself declared that trans people could serve openly and that it wouldn't be a big deal. The Trump administration straight up reversed that policy. And just a few months ago, the Supreme Court allowed that change to stand. And look, I want to be really clear.

This is not a hypothetical issue. It's not, oh, hey, should we allow trans service members to serve or not? They are already serving. There are a few thousand transgender U.S. service members right now. These are real people who are serving our country today. They're engineers, soldiers, and pilots, and this change affects their lives directly, yet we almost never hear from them when talking about the issue. Think about this. What is it like to sign up to serve your country and then to be told by that country you're not welcome? Well, our guest today is someone who knows what that is like very personally and is in the thick of the effort to

change it and educate the public about the issue. Bryn Tannehill is a Naval Academy graduate and former naval aviator, but she hasn't just served. She's also been an activist and researcher on transgender issues for a decade. She's written for the New York Times and other outlets. She's been a board member for Sparta and the Trans United Fund. And her first book, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans But Were Afraid to Ask, is out now. And it aims to dispel common misconceptions about transgender issues for a wide audience. That is a mission that is very much after my heart,

and she is with us here today to tell us her story and to dispel some of those common misconceptions right here on the show. Without further ado, let's get to the interview with Bryn Tannehill. Bryn, thank you so much for being on the show. It's absolutely my pleasure, Adam. Thank you for having me on it. So, let's start at the beginning. I mean, when did you know you wanted to be a pilot? So it was when I was six. And my wife had a professor who once joked that the only people who know what they want to be at six and

actually carry through are pilots. And it's true. You can't get it out of your blood. The only cure for wanting to fly is embalming fluid. That's really funny because I feel the opposite. I have literally no desire. I knew that about myself at six. I never want to fly a plane or a helicopter or any other sort of device. I want to walk around. I'm happy to sit in one. How does it express itself? How do you know that you want to do that? So my mom was a teacher next to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, and they used to be the training base for F-15s. And back in the early 80s, that was the hottest jet in the world. And I'd go into school with her in the mornings and watch them do takeoffs in formation.

Full afterburner, you could just feel it rumbling in your chest, 30 feet of blue flame in the desert sky. And I'm just looking up going, oh, I want to do that. It was like getting to watch NASA launches every morning. And that was what I wanted to do. And my poor grandmother, I begged her to go to the Pima Air Museum all the time, and she dragged me out there in the desert sun to look at these oxidizing hulks of aluminum. And I was just like, oh, my God, I saw this in a book, and I did this. And she was awesome about it. And I ended up going to the Naval Academy and I wanted to fly. That was the big thing is I wanted a flight billet. And I actually got through there and got a flight billet. So I went off to flight school and I ended up in

helicopters after getting through flight school. And then I went on to fly P3Cs, big four-engine maritime patrol aircraft for a while. And the problem was, is that when I was 13, I realized I was experiencing gender dysphoria. And I was being a smart kid and a researcher and somebody hung out in the library way too much. And I passed to the Arizona State University Library. I figured out, okay, yeah, this is what trans looks like. But I wanted to be a pilot. But I couldn't do anything. And I had a religious family.

And I was just like, okay, I'm going to bury this as deep and as far as I can and hope I can just power my way through it and never have to deal with it. Can you just tell me, especially for those who are a little new to the topic, like gender dysphoria at 13, what is that like? What does that mean for you at that time? So gender dysphoria, the idea is you suffer distress and discomfort with your body and with your gender expression and your gender role. And I felt it as extreme discomfort with my body. and I felt it as extreme discomfort with my body. And the way I would describe it is somebody with gender dysphoria going through the wrong puberty. I know this is an old movie.

Have you ever seen The Fly with Jeff Goldblum? Classic sci-fi. It's bizarre. I've never seen the movie. I'm familiar with the premise. So you're kind of turning into something greasy, hairy, and gross and it's really unpleasant. You can't explain to anybody what's going on.

Oh, wow. So it's really super unpleasant for the trans person going through it, and you can't – and especially back in the days, like the early 90s, there was really no one to talk to. And I knew my parents had told me better dead than gay, so I was just like, I'm going to keep my mouth shut on this one. And there's no even label for that feeling. I mean, now kids could presumably go on the internet and find a community, find other kids going through the same thing. But in the 90s, we didn't even have a word for it. At least I didn't. And they knew about it, but there was very, very little research

on teens experiencing it. but a lot of the – there was very, very little research on teens experiencing it. And a lot of the information dated back to the 60s and 70s when they had some really, really weird archaic views that they didn't understand the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. They – like when I found books, they didn't recognize that transgender people could be gay or straight. It was just like, no, all transgender women are going to be attracted to men, period. Right. Huh, weird. So, yeah, because I'm like, I don't fit that. What's going on?

And that was kind of a mechanism I used for kind of some internal denial. And I was like, well, this textbook from the 70s says something different. So I'm not trans, right? I'm trans. When did you figure that out? Especially, I'm so curious about, you're on this one track where you're becoming a freaking pilot, and then there's this other thing about yourself that's developing. And when did you have that realization?

So I knew intellectually that I had dysphoria at 14, 13 or 14. I knew at the academy that I was still experiencing it. I was still experiencing it in 2005, 2006 when I had a year-long deployment to the Mideast. Wow. And where were you deployed? I was deployed to Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. Wow. Great. Yeah. It's very flat. It's very sandy. It's very hot, very humid.

There's not a lot in the way of local tourist attractions. They've got the Tree of Life, which is this big acacia tree growing out in the middle of nowhere. That's pretty much it. Wow. And you're just very much focused on flying, flying, flying. Flying, flying, flying. And then I got to a point in my career where I wasn't flying anymore. And I ended up getting out of the Navy or getting out of going off of active duty, going into the reserves.

And while I was in the reserves, it got to a point where the dysphoria was affecting me. It was affecting my family. It was affecting my spouse. And I went to the individual ready reserves, which you can kind of think of as the inactive reserves. You stop doing the two weeks a month, two weeks every year, right? And I went into this inactive status. used it the way you're supposed to, which is it's there for people with acute medical conditions who can't deploy for whatever short period of time to take care of the problem and get back to a deployable status. Problem was is there was no mechanism for me to get back in, which is how I entered into LGBT military movement. So in that time when you were in the individual ready reserves, is that sort of when you transitioned?

Yeah. So May of 2010, I transferred to individual ready reserves. And like a month later, I was starting to see a therapist about the gender dysphoria. And six months after that, I was seeing a doctor about it and starting a medical portion of transition. Wow. And starting the medical portion of transition. And so then you're now, you're living your life post-transition. I mean, you've been through that. You're living with a different gender identity. Is that the correct way to put it? Well, I'm living, I've always had the same gender identity. I'm just living in my affirmed gender.

Right. It's usually one of the, the language is still evolving. Go figure. And yeah, I can see how that might pose a problem if the military doesn't have a classification for that, if they don't have a way to recognize that.

Now I would like to re-enter, but you've made this massive change. So I ended up being one of the senior ranking officer in this organization for transgender service members, almost all of whom were closeted. I was one of the very few people that could come out because at the time, the military medical manual said that if somebody has gender dysphoria, they get kicked out. No questions asked.

Basically, what would happen to anybody who came out was they would be given an administrative separation for medical reasons, and usually that would take about 30 days. But there was no way to stop it. There was no way to get a waiver. So let me ask, did you know this when you began your transition? Because, I mean, that's very stark. And I can imagine someone might read that and say, okay, well, if I do this, then I simply have to quit because that's what the military says. But you instead went, you know, transition said, no, I'm still here. I'm going to sort of, it's almost civil disobedience in a sense in that way. So when I got out and transitioned, I knew that this was probably going to be the cost. But because of how urgent it was and how it was affecting me and how it was affecting my

family, it became the number one priority is to take care of my family and myself first. And that's what it's there for, the IRR is there for. But going back to it, I knew that we could make change because all this, keep in mind, as all of this is happening, we're right at the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, right? And we're starting to see the marriage equality movement coming through and we're winning battles there. And it's during the Obama administration and the organizations that worked on Don't Ask, Don't Tell with the Department of Defense had established the connections with the DOD that we needed to continue to get the medical regulations changed. And so from 2012 through 2016, I was working on getting the DOD to change the medical regulations through our organization, SPARTA. You became an activist on this.

Yes, and that was kind of my entree into activism was getting this change. And it was really funny because when I started working on this, and I told other activists what I was working on that are, you know, in the bigger movement, they were like, oh, yeah, you sure know how to pick the easy ones. And the assumption was it would take another 10, 15 years to do it in 2013. But they didn't count on just how good an organization run by nothing but trans military people could be. Because we were – usually – If anybody's organized we were, usually the LGBT movement. If anybody's organized. Yeah, usually the LGBT movement

as a whole, it's kind of like herding cats. Yeah. And then you get this organization of nothing but active duty military people and reserve military people and, you know,

you make a decision. Everybody sticks with it and if you don't like it, well, you're outvoted and well, you know, salute, carry on. And, you know, and there's a chain of command, and, you know, we're very self-organized. And we organized based off of who looked good on camera,

and who was a good researcher, and who was an expert in this field, and who was an expert in that field. And we had psychologists, and doctors, and lawyers, and pilots, and we had a researcher like me, and I was responsible for a lot of the policy development and recommendations that went forward to the DOD. And there was always in the back of my mind, me trying to find a way to scrape back in, because I didn't have enough years in the service to retire. And so if you were to leave at that point, what would that mean for you? So it means I've got 16 years of good service, and I don't get a pension, and I don't get TRICARE. Oh, wow. I want to retire.

That's a huge loss, especially. And not to mention, I mean, you want to serve your country, right? And we want you to if you want to. to if you want to. So beyond just the simple monetary considerations, there is the fact that, yes, I want to crawl back into the cockpit more than just about anything else in the world. You know, if you give me three laps in the pattern, I might consider selling one of the kids. I mean, you'd have to bid for the one that's pissing me and mom off right now. Well, and you know, the United States, the people of the United States shouldn't have an interest in people like you who want to crawl into the cockpit. Well, we need you to do

that. We need people to crawl into the cockpit and we don't have a, uh, it's, it's not, uh, serving us well to, to not allow you to on a fundamental level is, is what I believe. I'm not going to do it, right? So I shouldn't be putting barriers in place to folks who do. Well, in a good economy, the military has traditionally had a very hard time getting enough people in, and that's the case right now. We've got a good economy, and a lot of organizations like the Army, Army National Guard are having a hard time meeting recruiting goals. And you're taking people like me, who I just passed my aviation flight physical to get back in this past year, as part of my attempt to get back in. Because eventually the policy did change.

And there was a window of, you know, 15, 16 months where I was able to apply and start getting back in. That's shutting down for me. And I'm one of the very rare cases here where what they do is this new policy. It grandfathers in the people who've already come out and got a medical diagnosis, but it bars anybody else who comes out and gets a medical diagnosis from serving. And it also bars anyone else from transitioning on the service. And it bans anybody who has a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or who has ever transitioned, even though I'm stable, even though the most rigorous physicals they give anybody, Army and Navy aviation medicine, have said, I'm good to go,

have been for a long time, I'm still not able to enter because I would have to detransition and then stay that way for years and years and years in order to get back in under the new rules. And that's not happening. Wow. Well, let's keep going through chronologically because I just want to keep understanding your path. So when you were being an activist about this, you said you're submitting policy to the DOD. I mean, how are you doing that as sort of a group of activists? You said some are still in the closet. Like how do you go about – I don't imagine the military as the kind of thing where you can just like show up to a neighborhood council meeting and say, hey, here's my policy.

Can I get some time with one of the generals or admirals, right? So how do you go about fighting for that? Well, doing the research itself is pretty boring. I looked at policies from around the world, and I look at the FAA's policies, and I looked at policies for police departments and fire departments, all sorts of military analogous organizations. And I conducted qualitative interviews with transgender service members in other nations and their commanding officers. And I did anonymous interviews with transgender people serving currently at the time. And then I built it together and said, here's the kinds of policy issues you're going to need to address. And here's your best debris

practices for everything. And here's a documentation on how other organizations have done it. Boring policy, wonky stuff. How you get that into the building. Remember, this is coming right off the heels of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. We still had connections inside the building. We were lucky enough that one of our board members was West Point class of 1980. That was the first class of women at West Point. And she had friends within the building that she could introduce us to and get the ball moving. And the other way that we did it is we – so we generated interest from inside the Pentagon, and we had pathways to push the information in. And at the same time, we were putting our service members who were getting kicked out in The New York Times and The Washington Post in 2014 and 2015, that's when Ash Carter was taking it off heat.

He's like, OK, we need to research this. And when he'd said that, that was when we were starting to push in our information. That's such smart activism to like really look for those openings and, you know, in the political structure and put your argument in there. What were the sort of arguments that you saw and I suppose continue to see the most against transgender service members serving openly? And how do you dismantle them? So the biggest ones back in 2010, somebody talked about, well, someday the transgender people might want to get in, and here's all these problems that we think we're going to see. And usually it focused on, like, bathrooms and toilets and showers.

People are so concerned about the bathroom all the time, about just what sign is going to be, which little icon you're going to see on the front door of the bathroom. And it's really kind of funny because we looked at how service members in integrated units have dealt with the issue, and we've already figured it out. I mean, and it can be as simple as hanging up a blanket between two halves of a tent. Or it can be as simple as this really, really novel technology, advanced high-tech materials called a shower curtain made of PVC. I mean, really, or vinyl. It's super high-tech. So that was actually one of the easiest ones to dismantle. But then they wanted to know things like how much is this going to cost? How

much time is this going to take for people to recover? And we had to bring in subject matter experts from various disciplines to tell them, well, you know, corporations that have allowed transgender people to transition on company insurance plans, it raised insurance rates by something like eight one-hundredths of one percent, typically for a large corporation, which is, when you do the math, that's like, oh, God, something like eight cents out of a hundred. It's ridiculously low. If you had $1,000, it'd cost you less than a cup of coffee or a soda. So there's that. Then the other one was, well, what about being able to deploy? And the answer is, well, yes,

transgender people do undergo procedures, but the procedures actually have a relatively short recovery time. Most people return to full duty in six weeks or less, right? And that's not huge, considering there's other procedures that'll knock you out for nine months to a year, like a torn ACL. And that happens a lot when you're carrying around, you know, 100 pounds of battle rattle jumping over fences, right? So there was that argument. And we've actually got a lot of members of SPARTA downrange right now. A friend of mine who got kicked out under the old policy sent me a picture of herself and three other trans women in the chow hall at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. And one of them was airborne, another was SOF, Special Operations Forces. Oh, wow.

You know, so I mean, the concept that we can't deploy is nonsense. And the idea- There are transgender service members deploying right now, deployed right now. There's tons. We did a study of our own membership versus the general population, the DOD, and transgender service members are deploying at the same rate as everyone else, about 40% per year. And the other thing is, is you can schedule your medical treatments such that you don't interfere with trainer deployment cycles. And we've done that successfully. And it's really interesting to me that in the don't ask, don't tell years, you know, between the institution of that policy and being removed,

it seemed a lot of the debate was, and again, I hate to say debate because it makes it sound like there's, you know, two valid sides to this argument. But a lot of it was about, it was more the ick factor. It was like, oh, come on, oh, they're going to take showers together. And like, oh, what, you know, it was like the general sort of, it felt like it was about the general issue of homophobia, right? Right. Whereas this issue is so much more cast in medical terms. You hear the reasons why, oh, well, it's too expensive. The medical treatments are too severe. The medical treatments are too expensive, that sort of thing. And those arguments are much more easily debunked than straight up homophobia. Homophobia, you have to get around people's prejudice. But if the arguments against, in this case, and to be cast in terms of like, well, hey, I mean, how much are the, you know,

pills going to cost? How much time off do you need to take? And that's very easily debunkable, which is what you said about doing. So to give you an idea, since 2016, the military has spent $8 million on medical treatment for transgender soldiers. But that sounds like a lot. No, that's nothing. But that's nothing. Let's put it in, let's put it in context. I know how much the military spends. The military in September of last year spent $4.6 million on lobster.

It spends on average over $80 million a year, right? On erectile dysfunction medication. And it spends on average about $430 million a year on military bands, right? You know, like, you know, John Philip Sousa stuff. Yeah, yeah. Right? You know, so in context, this is absolutely nothing in comparison with the rest of the budget. So the budgetary arguments are really easy to debunk. And they've kind of fallen back on the, well, it's too much of a hassle for us to let people transition. You know, this is a special accommodation.

And that would be easily debunkable. And it's also, you can see, it's really discriminatory. Because, okay, let's talk just for a second, a comparison. Let's say you have a woman that needs hormone replacement therapy, one of the most common medications in America, right? So you've got a little blue pill, and you take one a day. And so if you have a cisgender that is not transgender, a female service member taking them, that's okay. But if you have a transgender person taking that exact same medication, no, you can't have that because you're trans.

Yeah. So how is that not discriminatory? Yeah, it is. It absolutely is. And so these arguments that you're making are having some impact. And in, I mean, in 2016, the defense secretary said essentially the policy was changed, correct? Mm-hmm. And tell me about that. Yep, open service was. So that was a huge day for us, for most of us.

So in 2016, they announced that they were going to formally implement a policy in October of 2016 that we'd been working with the DOD to help draft the policy. It wasn't going to include a sessions policy. That's a policy for joining the military, which kind of hosed me over. So I'm, of all the people you've seen testifying in front of Congress, in the media, I'm more affected by this new policy than just about anybody you're seeing, because I can't get back in. And I'm going to be too old to get back in by the time it changes. But what changed was people could come out, they could get treatment. That was a huge one. They could change all their records. They could change their gender markers on their documentation. They could wear the correct uniforms. That was absolutely huge because for the first time in

America, you know, transgeneral people were serving in the military in their affirmed gender. people were serving in the military in their affirmed gender. And that might not sound huge, but there is such an American cultural tradition of respect for the military and seeing people who serve as full citizens, right? And we saw that with the Nisei soldiers and the Tuskegee Airmen and women when they got to join the academies. I mean, it's a big part of being seen as fully American. Yeah. And I can only imagine that you said that were there before this policy, were there other out trans service members as well who were suddenly able to now put on the correct uniform or be officially recognized? Yes. That must have been hugely meaningful. Oh, God, it was. It was in 2015. They stopped kicking people out, but there was no policy to transition.

So you had people who were kind of halfway between transitioning or waiting to transition, and they were dealing with largely untreated gender dysphoria or partially treated. There was no policy for how to deal with them. They were fighting with their chain of command and just waiting to be able to transition. And it's kind of a horse chomping at the bit. Yeah. And so when that happened, it was huge. It was an enormous weight lifted off of so many of our people.

And right now we've got 1,600 people serving on active duty with a gender dysphoria diagnosis. Really? Yes. But so this 2016 decision, that didn't help your specific case? Is that what you said? Yeah, that's correct. What happened was that they delayed the implementation of the accessions policy, and accessions meaning joining the military. And they put it off for six months, then they put it off a year. And then finally, President Trump made the tweets saying trans people were banned. And then there came the executive order and then the court cases. And eventually one of the courts ruled in 2017. No, the accessions policy has to go in place on January 1st, 2018. So this policy was – the accessions policy was sort of in the works.

It was going to be implemented. And so you had won all these gains for transgender service members, not your specific case. The people who were already in. Yeah. But the wheels are turning and you're very hopeful. You must have been very hopeful at that time of that 2016 time of the 2016 decision that that, hey, I'll be able to I'll be able to rejoin. But then Trump's election, those tweets, that's that's what that's what started to change. That cast it into doubt. And we were really hopeful at the time.

They're like, look, we're serving, you know, they're not going to go back. They can't want to go back. This is it would be just crazy. This would be they've made the policy changes. Yeah. You know, it would be a, it would be a public relations nightmare for the DOD and the white house. You know, maybe that's enough to deter them from wanting to do this. Um, and then they tried to pass a law in Congress, banning transgender service members and secret then secretary of defense, James Mattis, um, went office to office in the house of representatives and basically told them, no, please don't change this. It's just going to create headaches. Wow. And we actually got enough Republicans to jump and vote with Democrats in the House

in the National Defense Authorization Act in 2017 that the amendment to kick transgender people out failed. that the amendment to kick transgender people out failed. And after that, well, bluntly, the religious right that was influencing via Trump and Pence said, no, we really want to kick them out. And so that's when the Trump tweets came out. And when the policy came out, there was the Mattis policy in March of 2018. That was largely drafted by people at the Heritage Foundation, not the military itself. Really? That's what we understand. That's stunning because essentially you had already won over the military apparatus itself.

I mean, it sounds like both you had made your case and convinced enough people in power. But then also the institutional inertia was behind not changing the policy, that like just sort of the wheels of the machine were saying, no, let us just implement it this way. And it was literally just a very small part of the civilian leadership going against the entire military. Well, they're doing it very quietly. They're saying, this is not a good idea. Don't put us in this situation.

And they got put in that situation anyway. And because this is military, there is a deference to civilian leadership in the long run. Of course. And that's a good thing. That's what we want. We don't want a military junta running our country. Right.

It goes against every democratic instinct in my body. And even our own military culture is very much trying keeping the military out of the political fray as much as we can. Right. So it did turn out kind of the way the Pentagon expected, which is to say it was not good for them in terms of public relations. When we started this, they took some snap polling the day after the Trump tweets, and it said that 56% of the public wanted transgender people to be able to serve. A week later, it's gone up by 8 percentage points. And now I've seen one poll that came out within the past month right after the Supreme Court decision where 70% of the public thinks that transgender people should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military.

Wow. And so we've made fantastic gains. When I went back and looked at the polling data for what percentage of the American population in December 2010 was in favor of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell versus now, we're doing better now than they were doing in 2010 on Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Wow. Yeah. So the public has evolved remarkably on this. Yeah. So the public has evolved remarkably on this. And I credit, you

know, my colleagues at Sparta and Sue Fulton for helping to make such a huge difference and our allies who've helped us get our stories out. But this tells a bit bigger story in that we've got a public opinion and where our government is going diverging radically. And that's not a good thing when public will has no impact on public policy. Yeah. Well, I'd like to talk about what did this mean when the Trump administration put in its new policy and then that was affirmed by the Supreme Court finally a few months ago that – or it was not blocked by the Supreme Court finally a few months ago, or it was not blocked by the Supreme Court. What did that mean for you personally and for your family? So what that means for me is I'm probably not going to be able to get back into the military. I've been trying to get into the National Guard ever since January 2nd, 2018, when the accessions policy was in place and it wasn't a federal holiday. And that means I'm not going to get to my 20 years of good service. It means I'm not

going to have TRICARE for me and my spouse when we're- What is TRICARE? I'm sorry. I'm using military jargon. It makes me feel very cool that you're using so much military jargon, but then occasionally I need a cheat sheet. So it's not that cool when you find out what it is. It's basically the military insurance program that you use to get health care for your family when you're in the military. Got it.

And yourself when you're a retiree. So there's that. And given the way Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are going, those pensions and the ability to provide health care to my family going forward is really important to me and to my spouse. And beyond that, it stings being told after I've gone through everything I've gone through, after going through all these flight physicals and dozens of psychological tests and physical tests and everything, and passing them. and physical tests and everything and passing them. As a 44-year-old, a lot of 22-year-olds can't pass, being told, well, no, you're just not worthy because you're you, not because of there being anything physically wrong,

not because my medication isn't allowed by the military, not because I can't deploy, just simply who I am. You're passing the flight test. The military is saying you are fit to serve in every actual way that matters physically and mentally and skills and everything else. But it's almost as though they're saying the only reason you can't fly is pure discrimination. And the only reason I can't even get back in, not just fly, is because I'm transgender. That's really what it boils down to. And because I had the temerity to transition. I find this very upsetting.

Yeah, think how I feel. I know, I was about to say, just hearing about it is very upsetting. Just hearing about it is very upsetting. And I can't imagine how the emotions that must make you feel even towards your country, that is the country that you're trying to serve and that is not allowing you to. That must be so difficult. It can be really difficult at times. And there's moments when my faith and our ability to make ourselves better as a country wavers a bit. But at the same time, we talked about this a little bit earlier, is that public opinion is shifting and our culture is changing. And that's enough to give me some hope that this is worth fighting for and that is worth fighting for and something that we're going to continue to fight for because we can get better and we will get better. And it does sort of feel as though the, if public opinion, if the culture

is changing, you know, policies and administrations are temporary to an extent. They can certainly put in long, long lasting changes and, you know, do long lasting benefits or harms. But if the culture is changing, that is ultimately going to be the driver of what happens in the country, right? I mean, we saw that in the first wave of the gay rights movement, which is such a huge change that happened in my life, over my lifetime, that didn't seem possible

until it really just seemed like the minds of the public were changed. I do have that hope that if public opinion is ahead of the government, then eventually the government will have to catch up. Do you feel that way? So I don't know if it's going to catch up sooner or later, but eventually there's going to be a democratic administration or hopefully democracy continues and there's give and take in our government. One party rule kind of sucks having been in places with that. So assuming that there's another democratic administration, this policy will eventually be reversed. It will probably be too late for me because I'll have gotten too old to get back in under the rules for accessions policy.

But it will be over. It will be changed. And if there's another Republican administration after that, will they change it back again? I don't know. I would like to see legislation allowing transgender people to serve eventually so that we don't have to keep living in fear of the next administration is going to kick us out, not because we can't deploy or because we're expensive or because we're disruptive,

because we're none of those things, but simply because of thinly disguised religious beliefs. Well, on that note, let's take a short break. We'll be right back with more Bryn Tannehill. So I'm here with Bryn Tannehill. I want to ask, what are you doing now that you are, I mean I assume you're still an activist and are still fighting for your case as regards the military. But are you still flying as a civilian and how else are you using your time? So I've – throughout this entire process of being an activist, I've had a full-time job that has nothing to do with it.

I work in defense industry as a senior analyst at a think tank. So, I'm an analyst at a think tank. I'm writing a book. I'm scraping in flying hours with friends whom I can bum time with. Hey, I'll offer you gas money every once in a while, hopping in with a friend who flies commercial charters sometimes. That's fun. One of my favorite pictures of me is me getting some stick time with my friend between Boston and here. And then I'm married and three kids and kids doing crew and soccer and Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.

And I mean, aside from the activism bit, it's really kind of boring. But can I just say, you're like the picture of an all an all-american you know military member here it's it's mind-boggling that you know i mean you're you're a freaking defense analyst for uh uh for a think tank uh you're you're committed and you're uh you know smart it's it's like it's unbelievable that we wouldn't be that when we have an all-volunteer military we're not drafting folks we need volunteers uh you're raising your hand and we're like, and someone's saying no thanks to you. It's unbelievable. Well, the funniest part is Space Force, right?

Can I talk about Space Force for just a moment? Sure, sure. Tangentially, I've done a lot of research on how we do space operations as part of some of the analyses that I've done. And I've visited a whole bunch of bases that have telemetry networks and do control of satellite networks and do a lot of the stuff that Space Force is theoretically going to do. And I can say it's people sitting behind consoles at desks. They don't deploy. They're not carrying people out of burning Blackhawks under a hail of fire.

They sit at a console. Some of them are Windows-based. Some of them are Unix. Some of a console. Some of them are Windows-based. Some of them are Unix. Some of them Linux. Some of them are proprietary. But it's basically sitting with a keyboard and a screen somewhere in a silo somewhere or a base somewhere in the United States.

So it's kind of funny. As they're forming the Space Force, they're going to have to write transgender people out of it too, even though most of their arguments for why transgender people shouldn't serve fall absolutely apart under the entire concept of Space Force. Yeah. What does that have to do with, yeah, I mean, like it might matter if you're, I don't know, you are trying to transition between operating systems as you're using that computer.

You're like, oh. I think that's going to be a bigger hurdle. But yeah, what would that have to do with your, with your gendered identity? Um, let me just ask as an aside is cause I haven't been keeping up with it and you probably know more than me is space force happening. It's they're doing the preliminary investigations into how to make it happen right now. Yeah. Uh, is it a good idea? Um, can I, can I, can I, can I plead the fifth on that one? Yes, you absolutely can.

You absolutely can. No comment. I understand why you wouldn't want to go on record as a current defense analyst as we're still figuring that out. So, yeah, we'll move on from that. You've also written a book, which is wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about that? So I wrote this book called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Trans But Were Afraid to Ask. And it's based off of the title comes from something written in the 60s about sex.

But that book was written by somebody who was pretty conservative and had really nasty things to say about lesbian, gay, and transgender people back then. But the title is recognizable to everybody because it's, you know, there was a movie by Woody Allen with the same name and it's, so it's there. But when I started writing about trans issues, that's really how I got my start. And I started by doing the thing you're never, ever, ever supposed to do, read the comments, right? So I read an article about trans and about some kind of transgender issue and I read the comments and I'd be like, oh my God, this makes me so mad, you know? And it reminds me

kind of the XKCD cartoon is like, you know, why are you still up? Because someone on the internet is wrong. And so I started writing articles to debunk all of the nonsense and the misconceptions and the myths and the deliberate misinformation being put out there. And I started writing all these articles, and they really ranged over a lot of things, medicine and mental health and good science and bad science, dating and demographics and demographic shifts and politics and law and religion. And after like three years of this, and I'm writing, you know, two articles a week for, you know, three years, you know, people start going, when are you going to write

a book? I'm like, I don't know. And then I started trying to organize all this stuff that I've written. And I'm like, I've got, okay, I've got like maybe 30,000 words on medicine, and I got like 25,000 words on politics, and maybe 20,000 on religion. I don't know. That's not enough to make a book out of any of these, right? And then I had this kind of epiphany at some point. Why does it have to be about one of those topics? Because people have questions about all of them, and they keep coming up the same ones over and over again.

Yeah. Right? And so I'm just like, okay, let's make a book that answers everything, like all the big-ticket questions that keep getting asked over and over again or the big-ticket issues that keep coming up over and over again. And that's where I started trying to link all the bits and pieces together and make it flow into a more coherent narrative, and that was kind of the origin in 2016 of my book. Yeah, it's a wonderful book because it's an authoritative sort of reference or explainer. I don't think that the four dummies people have tackled this topic, so you might be the only person out there who has. And by the way, this puts you right after my own heart. I mean, I have made a career on debunking misconceptions and that sort of thing.

People have actually asked me, hey, you know, Adam, you should do Adam Ruins Gender, Adam Ruins Sex. We've done – we've sort of started to approach topics like that. But, you know, it's one of those topics where it's like, hey, it's not my experience. It's not something that I have the strongest background in. And, you know, ideally, you know, I think other folks are maybe better suited to be leading that conversation. So now that I'm talking to someone who is leading that conversation, what are the big misconceptions about trans that you've debunked? Like, what's the number one for you? So the number one that comes up

that people like to use to kind of indict trans people as well, it's in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it says it's a mental illness, so all transgender people must be mentally ill. And that's not true, according to the American Psychiatric Association, which wrote the manual, which notes that the critical component to gender dysphoria and a diagnosis is distress. Anybody who's good with their gender as they are, as it

is, they're fine. There's nothing to diagnose. It's like saying, well, you were depressed, you know, six years ago when your cat died, and you saw a therapist, and then you worked it out. Are you still depressed? Are you still mentally ill because your cat died six years ago? Well, no. You've worked through it. Same thing with gender dysphoria. It is an acute condition that's treatable. And they're moving away from that as a – they're moving towards a more medical treatment of that or a more medical outlook on that.

But there must be people who say, you know, in response to that, well, hey, if it's a condition that's treatable, why not just treat it with therapy? Isn't it something that you can treat away, you know, rather than going through any sort of physical or social transition, right? Why not just go to therapy? I mean, obviously, I believe that's an incorrect position, but that is the next question that someone who knows nothing might ask. Well, actually. Yes, you did.

I'm sorry. No, no, no, no. I'm sorry I should have gone there. No, no, I'm very happy to be actually. That is one of the number one talking points of the people pushing reparative therapy and pushing religious viewpoints on gender and sexuality as well. They should just undergo some form of conversion therapy to make them not trans. Problem is, is that they tried all the same things to make people not trans as they tried on gay men. And I'm talking, you know, psychic driving with MK ultra level stuff and electroshock therapy and aversion therapy and shock therapy and, you know, go marry a nice woman and that'll fix it.

You know, all the same sorts or just stuff it down deep. And they've known since the 60s and 70s that none of these things really actually worked. Nothing made gender dysphoria go away, that you can't make somebody not trans. But they did try actually letting people transition, and most of the people reported better health outcomes then. And then over the past 40 years, they've looked at this repeatedly, and the overwhelming body, the evidence say that the most effective treatment for gender dysphoria is let people be themselves. Yeah.

And if you want to look, if you want to check out the evidence for yourself, the What We Know Project at Cornell University online hosts pretty much all of the research done into the health benefits of transition for transgender people, both for and against, over the past 25 years. And the overwhelming body of it shows that this is the best treatment available for gender dysphoria, whereas nobody's ever demonstrated an ability to talk somebody out of being trans. Wow. So transitioning is really, even just from a health perspective, hey, that is the healthiest choice. For a lot of people, yes. And that's one of the other big misconceptions, is that all transgender people do a certain thing or have certain treatments.

And what it is is transgender people have treatments to address the specific issues that they have. Some transgender people have issues with their facial features, that looking in the mirror is very, very hard for them. And for some of them, having facial surgery might be the answer. Some people want bottom surgery. Some people don't. That would be like phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, or metoidoplasty. And some people don't. They're happy with what they've got. That's not something that bothers them or that they think about on a continual basis. Or does it affect their ability to function?

So that's also one of the big misconceptions, is that all trans people do the same things for treatment. One thing that I've heard from my own trans friends or from reading things that other trans folks have written is, as a misconception, is that the sort of like cis world's focus on what you've got down there is a little bit off target generally, right? That like there's an overemphasis on that, that we all seem, well, hey, but have you had the surgery? Oh, well, is it all the way because

you haven't had the surgery? Yada, yada, yada. There's like this lot of brouhaha around that topic when that's actually not A, as you said, the most important thing to the person, and B, nobody's business. Yeah. It almost kind of follows common sense. I'm not going to ask you about your bits or your junk, Adam. I promise you I won't do that. And I'd kind of expect the same from you to not ask me about the history of what's between my legs. That's really kind of rude.

And that's not dependent. Whether or not you treat me as a man in our society isn't dependent on your knowledge of my junk. You're not like, oh, hey, you had a bad accident. You stepped on a landmine a couple years ago and things got weird down there or whatever. That's a bad example because I'm talking to a military person. Well, that's actually one of those actually things is that the military was doing gender surgeries for people who suffered traumatic perianal injuries, up to 1,300 of them during the Iraq conflict.

Of course. Oh, my God. I mean, that makes so much sense. Of course they would be. I stumbled through my shitty attempt at a joke into a really interesting issue. Yeah, that's a really good point. Of course, of course they would be. And so why wouldn't they? Again, that is discrimination if they're not doing it, if they're only doing it for that reason. Mm hmm. But yeah, why – so yeah, if it's not about the genitalia specifically, right, what is it about for the average trans person? So – and like I said, which going through life as a closeted trans person a lot of times felt like meth-ic acting your way through life.

That you stand in front of the mirror in the morning and you don't like who you see and you don't quite recognize who you see, but you stand there. And the last interview I ever did before transition, I remember standing in front of the mirror in a suit and tie and thinking, okay, who am I today? Who am I walking in there? Who do I see myself as? Who am I projecting? What motivates me, right? And then when you do that, it's not just getting yourself into the role. It's having every moment of, am I speaking the right way? Am I gesturing the right way? Am I sitting the right way? Am I walking the right way? Am I carrying my bag the right way? Am I putting my hands in my pocket the right way? Am I doing all these different things that are gender cues that you have to try and consciously try and do the opposite way your instincts tell you to. And that's really difficult. And it's really, really stressful. There's an example of a journalist, lesbian, cisgender, Nora Vincent, who in the early 2000s decided as a social experiment she was going to try and live as a man for a year.

And the stress of trying to hold up the facade to present and act and be seen as a gender that she didn't identify with at all. She checked herself into inpatient mental health care at the 11-month mark of the experiment. So, I mean, it's very, even when cisgender people try and do what transgender people do, it proves to be very, very taxing. Yeah. And that sort of gives the light of the idea that, another thing that I hear said about being transgender is that it's like a phase that, you know, children might do it when they're, you know, they might be confused.

You know, hey, they're 11 years old and they're like, oh, my friend just transitioned. That might be fun if I did too. Or they're in an experiment, you know, they're in a fun experimental phase, but later they're going to change their minds. they're going to change their minds. But the way that you're putting it, if that's the way that it feels, if that's what it takes to do it, no one is going to do that lightly because the effort of doing it if you weren't feeling that way would be so enormous. So you actually stumbled onto one of my absolute worst pet peeves right here. And it's nothing bad. It's the fact that there's a piece of research out there that is leading people wildly astray. And it is so bad that I just can't resist making fun of bad research, if you'll let me.

No, no, that is what I'm all about. I would love to hear it. I was trying to set you up to talk about this. Yes, thank you very much. a kid that's hit puberty, that there is a – and they still have a cross-gender identification that this is going to go away, except for some people pushing reparative therapy. So there's a study that came out that claims that transgender kids are transgender because they interacted with transgender kids online and at school and psyched themselves up that they're transgender and it's a social contagion

and that you should do everything you can as a result to prevent kids from transitioning. But when you dig into the actual research, this is one of the absolute worst studies I have ever seen. So let's start out with the sampling methodology. With the sampling methodology. The person doing it, from Lisa Littman, only sampled from groups where she sent out an electronic questionnaire to parents who didn't support their trans kids. These were only sent, put up online in places where people who are opposed to trans people and letting transgender people transition go. So it was a poll of anti-trans parents. Right. Wow.

And then she got fairly predictable results, right? That everybody that she interviewed already believed in what she termed rapid-onset gender dysphoria. And, you know, they observed things like when the kids came out, their relationships with their parents deteriorated. Well, yeah, any kid that comes out in an unaccepting home is going to – you know, things are going to get a little bit dicey. The queer kid growing up in a Mormon home that comes out is going to – you know, they're going to suffer too. And it's not because they're trans. It's gay kids too. So you set up – and there was no control group. There was no control sample of, well, you know, your kid hits 14, and did they start pulling away from your parents, and does their relationship get worse?

Well, okay, I live with a pair of sulky teens. It's just kind of natural evolution of the parent-child relationship at times is you've got a kid that's like, you're not cool anymore. I don't want to be around you. I'm going to go hang out in the basement and play video games. Yeah, of course. Yeah. You know, and then there were other things like the grade point averages dropped. Well, yeah, you've got kids that are being told,

that are being rejected by their parents, and it's setting up a lot of stress, and their identities are being rejected, and they're being told they're wrong, or they're being put sometimes in front of reparative therapists. Well, yeah, that's kind of the sort of home life trauma that causes those things. And they also didn't interview any parents with transgender kids who are supportive. And there's a pretty big body of evidence that transgender youth who live in supportive

environments do way, way, way better than the ones who aren't supported. live in supportive environments do way, way, way better than the ones who aren't supported. And I liken this study as sort of creating a study to prove that Bigfoot exists by sending out questionnaires to the Bigfoot Believers Society of America and the Sasquatch Acceptance Society of Canada, and then saying, look, everyone says that Sasquatch is real, so obviously Sasquatch is real. You know, or taking the fact that the relationships with the parents got worse. It's kind of like interviewing 100 people who are kicking their – drop-kicking their puppies and concluding puppies are sad animals. And not asking whether or not it was the drop-kicking that was making the puppy sad.

Drop-kicking would make a puppy. Don't try it if you're listening at home. Don't drop-kick your puppy. We have a husky puppy. He bites everything and he's sweet. Well, so you're a researcher. You know this research probably better than most people on the planet. What do we know about trans kids or about kids who are – yeah, what do we know?

So the number one thing we know, and this is the thing that I emphasize at the end of my book, is like if you walk away with nothing else, the number one thing you can do for transgender kids is support them in their identity, even if it changes. But who they are in this moment, who they are seeing themselves, who they're exploring themselves to be, needs support in order to feel confident enough to find who they need to be in the long run. And there is study after study after study that shows kids who are in supported environments do way, way, way better than ones who aren't. And there's some other studies coming out by Joe Olson Kennedy finding that kids who have been supported from day one have mental health that's equal to the general population. And that's kind of the gold standard of mental health care treatments is at the end of it, is your group of patients as healthy as the general population? And if you've achieved that, that's it. You've

done the right thing. You have achieved the optimum outcome. And that's what I want people to know. And I want people, whenever you hear, well, what if it's a phase? What if they're doing it because of their friends? You know, that's not for you to decide. And the research that's being promoted to do that is being promoted by people who want you to reject your kid and do the absolute worst thing possible for your kid. Yeah. And this research isn't coming from a good place. And it's not coming from an honest place either. Yeah, I actually have a colleague in comedy who has a child who told my friend and their partner that, yeah, this is who I am. And the way he described it was that the uh, the kids said this so consistently, um, that it was, uh, you know, that they, they were able to tell that they had those questions, but, um, they could really tell that this was something that was decision to really universally support that

and that seemed like a very beautiful thing and I don't know, it sounds like a lot of the cases that people bring up against this issue are very hypothetical, that they say, well what if, what if, what if but when you're actually presented with your own kid if you're really listening to them in a genuine way that that can really lead you. And you're absolutely right that most of it is hypothetical.

And that when people start offering purely anecdotal evidence of, well, here's this one person, well, here's this other person, well, that's interesting and that makes for case studies. But what you want is large-scale quantitative data to make big-picture judgments, right? You don't want to do it off of one or two or three case studies. You want to know, okay, what happens when you look at it in the aggregate of 1,000? And what they found when they've gone back and looked at the data in Australia, where they have a national health service and everything goes into one database, is that the transgender youth who

identifies trans going into their teen years, about 1% desist, stop identifying as cross-gender. And that's a remarkably low number. And you're like, well, okay, well, that's one study. What about another? Well, they also have a National Health Service in Britain and a recent study that's coming up, they pulled the records of 303 transgender patients of the gender clinics in the UK. And they looked to go through their entire files to see how many people detransitioned and the answer was three. Of whom two people detransitioned because of lack of familiar support and one person detransitioned due to lack of familiar support and then retransitioned socially. So the evidence suggests that for particularly if they're identifying as trans well into their teen years, this is not going to change. And, you know, this is anecdotal, but that's my experience as well, is that it doesn't go away no matter how hard you fight it. And that putting off important decisions until way, way, way later, you know, instead of doing it in your teen years,

holding it off until you're in your 20s or 30s. At this point, you may have a family, you may have a career, and the social consequences of transitioning are far greater because you waited or tried to gut it out. And that's not healthy for anybody. And it doesn't just hurt the transgender person, it hurts everybody else around them that's relying on them at that point. If there was one thing that you could impress upon everybody in America about trans

folks, about the reality, about the research, what would it be? The number one thing I would want people to know is that the body of evidence at this point says that transgender people aren't choosing to be transgender, that this is not some moral failing or some perversion, but the overwhelming growing consensus is that things such as environmental factors such as endocrine disrupting chemicals, oligogenetics, and epigenetics seem to be why people are transgender and that this is not coming out of some malicious reason. This is not unnatural, that this is just part of the human experience in the broad sense, the same way that lesbians and gays are, the same way that autistic people are. transgender people and trying to dissuade them from being in public and from being themselves doesn't just hurt transgender people. It hurts their families. And it hurts us as a society as well, because it makes us less empathetic as a whole to people who are different.

Thank you for saying that, because that answered a question for me, because I had sort of slotted in the trans experience with my modern understanding of the gay experience, that this is a way that humans are. This is a part of natural human variability. This is one of the many millions and, you know, manifold variations in ways there are to be human. The main, to me, it seems the main change we need to make our society is when people are existing in a certain way, we need to acknowledge and accept that that is the way that they are. That, you know, we say this is you. You may live this way. Sorry, not even you may live this way. You are this way.

There's a space for you in society. And that's something that we're all going to accept and uphold. That's like the most basic acknowledgement of someone else's existence. And that once we do that, the friction disappears because that's just, if we were, you know, short people exist, but if we were walking around going, oh, there's no short people. What? Just get bigger shoes.

Like what's going on? Like, you know, you can't, we're not going to make clothes for your size. You know, that would cause a lot of friction in society. All the short people would be like, hey, no, I just, I just freaking exist. Can I just be short? Like, let's be. Have you considered being not short? Have you considered going to this therapist?

Yeah. That would be a strange state of affairs. And that's the strange state of affairs that we have to an extent with trans folks as well. And you touched on a point that I'd love to make, if I may. Please. Is that people look at Western culture and try and say that transgender people are new. This is some sort of modern weirdness. But it's not. It's simply based off of our Western culture that it seems new. There is a long history of gender variant people and third gender and multi-gender people across human time and history. The Hijra of India and eunuchs are mentioned in the Kama Sutra from

like 1500 BC. You had, the Bible describes self-made eunuchs. Similarly, you've got- And the Hijra are a current, like they're a group that exists in India today, correct? Yes, they do. They do. India and Pakistan. Yeah. And there's actually laws protecting them in both India and Pakistan now somewhat spottily, but there's actually a cultural acceptance of this. You have the Katoi of Thailand. You have the Faafafine of the Polynesian Islands, which tends to be some of the most accepting of gender variant people. And it's something that Western missionaries didn't actually eliminate from the culture. You can still find them. You have

descriptions of the Bardiche of the Western Native Americans, Native Americans during Lewis and Clark and the French exploration of the Mountain West. And we can go back a little bit further, almost 100 years, that we had what they called transsexuals at the time in Germany in the 1920s and early 30s. And you had the Institute for Sexuality on Magnus Hirschfeld studying transgender people and gay people. And they were way out of their time, solid 30 years. And then one of the first things the Nazis did in 1933 is they burned the entire library of Magnus Hirschfeld and all of his research in his notes. in his notes. Wow. And this is, I can imagine if you were growing up in one of those societies that has this sort of cultural slot and acceptance for trans folks, if you're having those feelings of dysphoria or a feeling, you'd say, oh, this is who I am. There's an easier way to say, you know, I can, this is a type of person that one can be, right?

So, it's very odd. There is some greater level of acceptance, but except for the Fa'afafine and some of the Native American traditions, like being Hijra Aktoi is considered, oh God, you know, it's kind of like your kid going, you know, deciding that they want to be, you know, I'm trying to think of something that's going to result in them living in your basement for the rest of their lives. It's like, oh God, did you have to choose that career path? Why? Okay. So I don't mean to uphold those as cultural models then. It's a, but it's a form of cultural acceptance where there is less moral stigma attached to it. And there's some Pew polling data that's mentioned in my book that, and it creates this weird situation in America where we've come so far on trans issues, and there's so much more acceptance than there was just 10 years ago. And so many people know trans people. It's more than doubled. So we have that level of acceptance. And you have transgender

people serving as appointees under Obama and in the military. So you've got that, and that's all really, really good. But America is also one of the countries most likely in the world to answer the question, is being transgender a sin? We're also at the highest end of that too, which kind of mirrors the overall split and polarization we see in the United States. Right. The change in American society has been so rapid, though. And in many ways, it sometimes seems to me that it's sort of a mirror of the gay rights movement. But a decade or so later, I remember, I went from, in my high school, I knew one out woman who, you know, started a, she like started a local chapter of PFLAG at her high school. And she had trouble getting people to show up to the meetings because, you know, they didn't want

to acknowledge that, you know, oh, is that even real? I don't know. I don't want to, you know, I don't even want to acknowledge it. She had, you know, I remember her being very alone in that, in that pursuit then. And it was a very heroic thing to do. And, you know, I remember a few years later thinking, you know, I had gay friends in college and, and, you know, them fighting for gay marriage. And it seemed like that was so far away, right? That it was hard to imagine even having that happen. And then when that change occurred, it was almost shockingly rapid. It was like we woke up one day in a society that – and not like it happened randomly. People pushed – it was activists working for years. But it was like the change in American culture and in our laws that we have seen happen far more rapidly than I had anticipated.

And then likewise with the history of trans Americans, I feel like the – I knew no – I felt that I knew no trans people very recently. Ten years ago, I certainly did not. And now it's a regular part of, of everyday life. And I remember the first time one of my friends transitioned and it was, it was, you know, unusual to me, right. And it required an adjustment, but now it's something that, uh, is, seems very, very normal. Um, there's been so much change that we've adapted to so quickly. I know there's still a long way to go. But so I got, my question is, you know,

does that give you reason for optimism that the, that the culture is changing so swiftly or, you know, where, where do you think we're left? I mean, obviously we have a, an administration that is not accepting of that,

but what do you think the, what do you think the prospects are for this cultural change and legal change? So we've got a lot of things going on. And you're absolutely right. All the data tells us that acceptance of transgender people is increasing and comparing it to the gay rights movement and acceptance of gay people is not a bad analogy. If you look at the data by Nate Silver on acceptance of same-sex marriage at 538.com, what he found is that there's been a relatively constant increase in support for same-sex marriage of about 1.5% per year.

And then when I look back at the data on the number of people who know a transgender person or have a close friend who's transgender over the past decade, the data says about the same thing. It's been going up at about 1.5% per year on average. And that's very closely correlated with acceptance. So that's really good. And that there's more knowledge and that I can't imagine a book like mine having been published 10 years ago and that I couldn't have published this book without all the research that's been done and the public exposure and things to bounce it off of. And that the public support for trans people in the military getting up somewhere between 60 and 70%, that's, you know, in American

politics, that's almost unanimity. That's overwhelming support in such a polarized society. At the same time, we have a Supreme Court and we have a the Supreme Court to take called Dover's Boyerstown where they are trying to get a ruling that even the prospect, the possibility of sharing a bathroom with a transgender person creates an inherently hostile environment, which means that schools and businesses and government and everywhere else would have to say no, transgender people cannot use bathrooms at all that are gendered because it's hostile to people who aren't transgender. Even if they don't know, just the possibility that there might be a transgender person in a bathroom with you is intolerable. And that's something the Supreme Court is going to be considering whether to grant certiorari, a take. They're going to be considering it again on Friday. You've got pushes to nullify all the laws in the United States that protect transgender people at the local and state level, basically with religious freedom, that people can ignore civil rights laws based off of their religious beliefs. And the Supreme Court is going to be looking at that too. They already looked at it once and kind of nodded in the direction of we should create exemptions for religious beliefs. They're going to be considering whether or not transgender people are protected from sex discrimination under Title VII and Title IX.

And that's another case they're going to be deciding whether or not to grant cert on. The religious right organizations, hate group organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom are trying to bring up cases in front of the Supreme Court to reverse the bans on reparative therapy under freedom of speech and freedom of religion. on reparative therapy under freedom of speech and freedom of religion. So we are seeing cases where they're trying to argue that being able to marry somebody doesn't confer the same rights if they're the same sex, that the state can say, well, we're going to give partner benefits to straight people, but you can't put your partner on the employee health plan if they're

the same sex. And that's something, a case that's ongoing in Texas and is going to hit the fifth circuit again, possibly. So we've got all these pushes. And then you have what the administration's doing to try and say that transgender people don't exist because they will only define people based off of what was on their original birth certificate. And so you've got all these pushes to try and marginalize trans people that are very hard to fight back against,

because it's at the level of the Supreme Court. And that if we lose, it takes decades to reverse decisions due to something known as stare decisis, which is respect for previous decisions. Yeah. And that sort of speaks to the fact that I think that cultural change that I was describing, you know, the rapidity of it makes it very easy for people like me to sit back and say, well, hey, you know, now everybody I know agrees, right? And so we've done our part. And that's all, you know, fine and good, right? But it neglects the fact that folks, the small minority that doesn't agree, can put through these decisions that can really make life much more difficult for trans folks, gay folks, any types of folks, if we're talking about these sorts of issues more broadly. And that, you know, it's possible for us to live in a – we could live in a society where everybody agrees except our laws for a long time. And it really, I don't know, makes it clear it's incumbent upon all of us to fight against them.

Well, and I can tell you that allies do make a huge difference in the workplace and in the ability to function and to be able to basically navigate the system. They're huge. And we've talked about some of the stuff offline where it's been important to me. But at the same time, there's a bigger contextual question. And this goes even beyond LGBT stuff. It's what happens when American culture goes one way, but its laws and policies go another. And at this point, the transgender issue or issues are kind of at the forefront of that. They're kind of, you know, being in LA, you know, you get the, it's like an earthquake, you feel the sharp shock first, and then you wait a few minutes and you get the slow ripples, right? What's going on with transgender people is like an earthquake, and that's the sharp shock that we're feeling right

now. We're just kind of at the forefront. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you being at the forefront of it and, you know, first of all, fighting for this issue in the military and writing your book and especially for coming on to talk to us about it. Yeah. It's been absolutely my pleasure, Adam. Thank you so much for having me on. Really, I mean it. By the way, I cannot tell you how many cool points I gained with my kids by talking to you. Look, I'll be honest. The best thing about the fact that kids like our show is that parents say, oh my gosh, I heard about that show for my kids. Yeah, sure. I'll come on. We get it. We book more experts that way.

It's like the two things that we can put on in our house that you put it on a TV and nobody argues. Nobody's like, no, I want to watch something else. It's basically Adam ruins everything and Mythbusters and Rabbit. Oh, that's so wonderful. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much for being here. You're welcome. Not a problem. My pleasure.