Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 271 | Investigating the New Generations of Transgender Girls | Guest: Abigail Shrier

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

Allie interviews Abigail Shrier, a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, on the alarming rates of females in colleges, high schools, and middle schools who are coming out as "transgender." Abigail has conducted nearly 200 interviews of trans-identified girls, their agonized parents, public school teachers, promoters of gender ideology, and a wide spectrum of medical professionals, and she shares some of the discussions from her new book, "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters." Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/irreversible-damage-abigail-shrier/1133754701 Today's Sponsor: Express VPN keeps all of your information secure by encrypting 100% of your data with the most powerful encryption available. Get an extra 3 months FREE! Go to ExpressVPN.com/ALLIE

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed.

You can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. Happy Monday. So today I am going to have an interview. I know typically we don't do interviews on Monday. We did last week and we are today.

But when I have an especially exciting person that I want to talk to and I don't want to wait until Friday to play you guys the conversation. Then I play it on Monday. And I know you guys are going to gain so much from this conversation that I'm having with journalist Abigail Schreier. She wrote the book, Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Cray, seducing our daughters. If it sounds controversial in this day and age, that's because it is. But we simply talk about the facts that she found in her book the implications of what is

very much a trend in young girls and in teens. teenage girls and the long-term implications and consequences of that. I'm so excited for you to listen to this conversation. I gained a lot of insight, and I know that you're going to as well. Without further ado, here is Abigail Shrier. Abigail, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me on. Could you tell everyone who you are and what you do?

Sure, I'm a journalist. I write most often for the Wall Street Journal, and I'm here because I wrote a book, irreversible damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters. Can you tell everyone how you came upon this subject and decided to write a book about it? Yeah. So this was not sort of a subject that affected me personally, and it wasn't something that I sought out. I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about transgender pronoun laws, compelled pronoun

use in California and New York. there are now laws that assign criminal penalties if you fail to use someone's preferred pronoun. This is straightforwardly unconstitutional under the First Amendment in America. The government can't make people say anything. And I'm a lawyer. And so I wrote a piece about this. And a mother got in touch with me and said her daughter had been caught up in this craze. And in fact, there were parents all over the country going through this with their daughter.

girls with no history of gender dysphoria, hitting their teenage years, and suddenly deciding they were transgender. And she wanted me to write about it. And at the time, I thought, well, that's the last thing I need is to wait into this. So I passed it on to another journalist. But what I found was that no one wanted to write about this. So after waiting for a few months, I got back in touch with the woman. And what was that process like when you reached out to this woman?

and kind of had the conversation, how did that develop into the story that I guess then laid the basis for this book? Right. So I wrote, I got in touch with her and a whole network of parents who were meeting in secret across the country. Terribly worried for their daughters who had suddenly decided they were transgender, daughters who were either on hormones or starting hormones and asking for surgeries. And all these parents overwhelmingly, they were politically progressive, but they did.

They accepted gay marriage. They had no issue with that. They even would have accepted a gay daughter, but they didn't think this transgender identification was authentic, and they didn't think it was doing their daughter any good. So I eventually wrote the story for the Wall Street Journal, last, not this past January, but the January before 2019. And it sort of was explosive.

It was the biggest article in a mainstream newspaper to address this contagion. And I got a lot, a lot of people. parental response and as well as professional response. A lot of therapists and doctors reached out to me and then I had the basis for a book. And I'm sure you got, well, I know you did, you got a lot of pushback. I think there was even an article written in the New York Times in response to your article, correct? That's right. You know, by Jenny Boylan wrote a piece responding to it in the New York Times saying that this wasn't a pure contagion. This was sort of an authentic choice.

and, you know, I don't want to put words into her mouth. But, you know, I did get a lot of pushback. I would just say that the numbers kind of speak for themselves. My book is not based on original research. It's based on the research of public health researcher Lisa Lipman at Brown University, who found that the prevalence numbers among teenage girls didn't make any sense. They were way higher than expected. And they came out of nowhere.

This is not traditional typical gender dysphoria that we're seeing. Right. And we know this because we've had in the early 100-year diagnostic history of gender dysphoria. It's always been little boys, you know, preschool, it emerges in preschool age and they just don't, they insist they're not a girl, I mean, not a boy, don't want to be a boy. These are little boys in terrible distress. And most often they outgrow it. That's what it always was. In the last decade, this, this gender dysphoria has exploded as a self-diagnosis, specifically among teenage girls. And this, this gender dysphoria has exploded as a self-diagnosis, specifically among teenage girls. And this. And this. And this is, this gender dysphoria has exploded as as a self-diagnosis, specifically among teenage girls. And this is true across the West, not just in America, United Kingdom, Scandinavia. So it's a big problem. Right. And how did this come about? This wasn't something that we were thinking about as much, at least in mainstream circles, even 10, 20 years ago. So what were the, what were the factors that played into what is obviously a contagion. So a few things. So these are young girls. First of all, I don't want to minimize their distress. They're in severe distress. These are girls with high anxiety, high rates of depression,

as this generation tends to have, especially among its teenage girls. And when teenage girls are in distress, and this is true of people generally, but especially teenage girls, they tend to look to the culture or look for ways to describe what they're feeling. And one of the things that had become more socially acceptable was to describe their feeling as gender dysphoria. Gender ideology has been pushed very hard in the school systems. It's been pushed very hard on college campuses. It's very sort of in college campus to declare an LGBTQ identity. And it was something that immediately lifted these girls' popularity at a time when they were really looking to make friends. And then there's social media, which has exacerbated the phenomenon enormously. There are all

kinds of transgender influencers all across social media. These are young teenagers who promise, they post these wonderful, you know, exciting videos that are fairly addictive. And they promise that if you just start a course of tea, all your troubles will disappear. And so would you say that most of these young women who are kind of suddenly saying, okay, when, when they're a teenager, that I am transgender, I no longer feel that I'm a girl anymore, would you say typically What led to that was a feeling of being an outsider in other ways and an inability to kind of fit in socially that maybe pushed them in that direction? That's exactly right. So this is the same old, you know, age-old trouble with adolescents that young women have always had.

Their bodies are changing fast. Social rules seem to change on them, you know, all the time with clicks, navigating clicks at school. These girls are very highly precocious. they tend to be, you know, white middle and upper middle class girls, highly educated parents. They have a lot of pressure on them. And they're not fitting in in school so easily. And the way other girls might have, you know, in prior eras, these same girls would have reached for anorexia or cutting or bulimia, which were, you know, at various points, very popular. But today the thing to do is to decide that your real problem is your gender and that you're supposed to be a boy.

I gotcha. And what is the typical response for a young woman who in high school or in college? Maybe they don't go to their parents, but they go to a school counselor or maybe an administrator and say, this is how I feel I want to be a boy now. Or maybe they, you know, somehow they have access to a doctor without their parents. What happens from from there when these young women are affirmed in their new. found male identity. Right. So the thing that makes this so different and the reason it has spread like is spread so rapidly like wildfire is that no high school principal celebrates a kid with bulimia. No no therapist says to a kid who says they're bulimic. That's, oh, if you're bulimic, then I, you know, that that's great. I'll call you whatever you want.

Let's let's help you get a, you know, liposuction. to help you deal with your fat. But that is what's happening across schools. The school will change a child's, this is true. Throughout California, New York, New Jersey, they will take the child's name, new name and pronouns. They will keep this from the parent. They keep it secret from the parent.

And the child is then encouraged to use the opposite-sex bathrooms of their choice. They stay with the boys on the overnight trip. And they are treated as a boy in school without. the parents' knowledge. So it tends to solidify the identity in the child's mind. And at what age can these young women start taking testosterone and going down the path of so-called transitioning? So the age of medical consent varies by state. In Oregon, it is 15. And it's not only that they can get these drugs so young, but they get them so easily. So you don't even need a therapist note.

You don't need anyone to confirm your diagnosis of gender dysphoria. You simply self-diagnose. You show up at a clinic and say, and it can even be Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is one of the major suppliers of testosterone across the country. So you go into Planned Parenthood and you say, I have gender dysphoria. I've always hated being a girl. I'm really a boy. And they say, okay, sign these forms.

Here's your testosterone. Wow. And I wonder what brought us here to the point of being able to so easily accept something that for a very long time we recognized as a dysphoria. Like you said, we recognize the legitimacy of the distress that a lot of times young people felt in their own bodies and they were treated in such a way as if they had this kind of dysphoria or dysmorphia. but we have transitioned into an attitude and a very aggressive posture of not just accepting it, not just saying, okay, you know, we'll call you by your pronouns, but actually helping people without the consent of their parents physically transition to me without any thought of the physical and psychological consequences for that young person's life. Is that true?

Yes. One of the really insidious things about this crazy is, that the activists were able to really take over the professional, medical professional organization so that almost every medical professional organization has adopted affirmative care as their standard, meaning that when a patient shows up and says, I hate my body, I hate that I'm a girl, I'm really a boy, the doctor has to agree with them. They have to affirm their self-diagnosis. There is no other mental illness. You know, if a child shows up and says, I'm so fat, I hate, I hate my body, please

call me fatty. The mental health professional does not respond with, okay, fatty, let's help you get liposuction. But when a child says, I have gender dysphoria, I hate myself, I'm really a boy, the doctor is supposed to say, okay, Jimmy, let's talk about how to get you the hormones you need. So that's the standard. It's not, because I've heard that it has to be persistent and consistent, you know, for a certain number of years. Are you saying that the standard is actually a lot lower than that? So that is the, that's the DSM definition in the diagnosis, you know, the diagnostic manual that's most, you know, the psychiatric manuals used in that they, that is the definition of gender dysphoria. They require, you know, consistent, persistent feeling in biological sex. But no doctors are checking

for that, right? So the patient comes in and says, I have felt this way since I was a child. And they'll be coached on social media, exactly what to tell the clinics. And by the way, it's often not even a doctor they see, they self-diagnose, and it's on the basis of the self-diagnosis that they're given medication. What are some of the physical consequences of young girls and teenagers altering their hormones and altering their bodies to try to fit what they believe is their new gender identity? So the really insidious thing here is there's good stuff and bad. So the stuff that's good, the good effects of, for instance, testosterone and these girls are taking massive doses, or it suppresses anxiety, so they feel better.

It delivers euphoria, so they can't wait to tell their friends how great it is. And it even helps them treat depression. And it also redistributes fat. So girls who have changing bodies who maybe are having trouble controlling their weight for the first times in their lives, all of a sudden, that's taken care of. So they feel great. The problem is, of course, long term, there's a very large risk of infertility. If they've been on it for five years, doctors will recommend a prophylactic hysterectomy.

It will add body hair and facial hair in ways that don't go away. It alters body feet. It also, it alters facial features and it lowers the voice. It also changes a girl's private anatomy, and that does not seem to go away, even after you go off of it. So these girls who, for a lot of them, decided to transition in this way because they previously felt, you know, socially isolated or that they weren't celebrated or accepted, do most of them in your study and your experience find that acceptance and that celebration and that self-confidence that they were looking for? So if these girls were thriving, I wouldn't have written this book. If the book was just about, you know, these girls decide they're transgender, but they go to college, they get great jobs, they have great friends, they're so happy, there's not a book to write. Maybe it is better to transition in that case.

The reason I wrote the book is because they're often their mental health deteriorates. It's important to know that these girls are not what their problem is not actually gender dysphoria. In fact, it doesn't look like typical gender dysphoria at all. So the things they do to treat it, you know, including transition, don't alleviate their mental health problems. And very often they get worse. They cut off families. They are unhappy.

Their depression gets worse. Their dysphoria often gets worse because they go through one treatment, but they still don't quite look like a boy. So then the question is, what's the next treatment they need? Hey, this is Steve Dase. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues face our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested

against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. We're told by gender activists that if doctors and parents don't affirm their child's boy or girl,

new gender identity, even if they're three years old and they say, you know, I feel like I'm a boy or a girl today. I feel like I'm the opposite sex. If that is not affirmed throughout their life, if they're not given, you know, dresses to where if they're a boy or a new name, if they're a girl, whatever it is, then that is actually what leads to depression and suicide. It's the affirmation we hear that alleviates all of those things and allows them to be their full selves and, you know, not be depressed and not feel like outsiders. But is that actually true? Is affirmation what they need to alleviate the problems that

they have? So there's actually no proof that affirmation leads to better mental health outcomes or that it cures suicidality. You know, there's a very good study by Christina Olson, who's a big proponent of affirmation, but, you know, there are a lot of flaws with the study, including the fact that it didn't, it looked at the mental health of these kids some period after affirmation, but didn't look at the mental health before they were affirmed. It also relied on parental reports. It also relied on parental report, which is not not bad enough itself, but of course, the very parents who transition their young children were then asked, are they happier? And of course, there's a high incentive for them to say yes. After all, look what they just did to their children. It's very

hard for the same parents to admit that there might have been a problem. But there's just been no indication that long term this cure suicidality. And in fact, the suicidality rates are extreme and suicidal ideation rates are extremely high. even after affirmation and after medical intervention. So there's certainly no cure. I think that it's fair to say that it's fairly irresponsible of therapists to trot out the so-called suicide narrative as quickly as some of them do.

The moment a parent is uncomfortable or says, I really don't think this is appropriate for my kid. She never had gender dysphoria as a child. The therapist will often immediately hit them with, well, she may kill herself then. It's an incredibly coercive thing for a therapist to say. And I've heard from a lot of parents that it happens as an initial suggestion, not even something that they have to work up to. How often do these young women want to transition back to being a woman?

How often are there regrets? So we don't know the rates yet. obviously this has been an explosive phenomenon in the last 10 years so we're still waiting to find out. I can tell you that I've interviewed a lot of detransitioners because of course gender dysphoria was never really, you know, typical gender dysphoria was never really their problem. This is very often no solution. So I've interviewed a lot of women with a lot of regret. I can only tell you that the detransitioner group on Reddit now has 13,000 members.

So we know that there's a, and the early fast, the earlier, time that I checked against six months prior, it had only 7,000, I think. So we know that this population of detransitioners, so-called, you know, people who did medical transition and now are trying to go back, that this is exploding. And it's very worrisome because we are fast-tracking transition in this country. Our psychologists and doctors, I mean, they have to know the science. And they have they have to know that this physically, biologically, psychologically isn't best. Based on the data that we have, is it best to rush young women into transitioning simply because they feel, you know, socially isolated? Are they just scared of the gender activists? Are they

scared of getting canceled? Do they just want to be politically correct? I mean, why aren't more doctors standing up and saying, hey, this isn't medically or scientifically right for these girls. So I think there's a couple of different, you know, reasons for this and explanations. One is that the science has become highly politicized like every other area of science. So for every, you know, even though there are a lot of flaws in the studies pushing affirmation, if you're not sort of careful and you don't read them critically, a lot of, you know, doctors really push the idea that that transition is better. And it really takes some digging to show that that's not the case.

But there's something even worse, which is that in, I think we're up to 18 states have passed conversion therapy laws. Now, these laws were intended to ban conversion therapy, the really ugly practices that inflicted a kind of torture on gay kids and trying to make them into straight kids. unfortunately gender identity language was inserted into these laws so that you're not allowed to as a therapist try to convince a child who has discomfort in their biological sex that they're trying to you're not allowed to or you run the risk of running afoul of the laws if you try to help them become comfortable in their in their biological sex um the reason that matters is because for years

that's exactly how a therapist treated gender dysphoria by helping kids get more comfortable, and they were very successful. It's very strange that this culture and these generations that are very centered on self-love, loving yourself and body positivity are simultaneously saying in many cases that, yes, you should hate your body and your body is a mistake, and you should deny your body and seek to change. change your body so it can match what you feel on the inside. But to me, I mean, that is obviously contradictory. If we're talking about the importance of appreciating your body and appreciating how God made you, we should say, you know, your body actually isn't a mistake. And it's okay

if you are a girl who likes to play sports. If you're a girl who doesn't like to wear dresses, if you are a girl who is, you know, more tomboy or more traditionally masculine, we don't have to abide by every gender stereotype that has ever existed. But that doesn't mean that you need to alter your body hormonally and even surgically. What happened? Like when did we jump the shark from saying, okay, gender stereotypes don't have to be abided by, but it's okay for you to be who you are, to actually gender stereotypes do have to be abided by and you have to change who you are to match them. I'm just a little bit confused. Right. Well, it's not good. good today to be a white girl. And a lot of these, it's hard to miss that a lot of these are white

girls. So I don't think it's great to have a white girl body. They're told in so many ways that it's better to be a boy and it's even better to have a victim status. And that's what this gives them. It's the only victim status that they can choose for themselves. They can't choose to be poor because they're not. They can't choose to be minorities. They can't even necessarily choose to be gay. But they can choose to be trans. So it's a way. that young girls can get popularity and sympathy in schools and in the university. That just breaks my heart. You have gotten even pushback for this book from places like Amazon who said that they

weren't going to allow your book to advertise. Is that correct? That's right. They advertise all kinds of books that are so excited for teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria to medically transition and change their bodies. irreversible ways. But if you have a book that's skeptical of that, they don't allow you to promote it. Wow. That's amazing. And they didn't change their mind. I'm sure that you guys kind of asked them, what's the deal with this? And did they have a response? Yes, they said that it,

I think it ran, they said that it was offensive conduct. It contained offensive content, which is interesting because right next to my book, depending on what search terms you enter, you will get silicone undergarments for trans, you know, biological men so that they, you know, have the undergarments to look like they have the anatomy of women. That's, that's okay. You can sponsor ads for that. But my book, that's skeptical that these girls are heading anywhere good, that's not allowed. That's offensive. That is crazy. Can you talk about the other side of this as well, not for young women who are transitioning, but also for young women who are now having their exclusively female spaces invaded by biological males in the name of tolerance and

inclusion. What's the future of female sports, female bathrooms, female locker rooms? Right. So I think the future is bleak, and I think young girls have figured that out. they know that the culture has turned against them. Part of the crisis that they're experiencing is not just routine adolescent crisis, but also the fact that they know that they've noticed that mediocre boy athletes are now allowed to out-compete them, even if they've worked very, very hard. They know that biological men who claim to be women are now allowed in their locker rooms because it's happened.

And they know that it's just not that esteemed or great, now to be a girl. So yeah, I think that's having a big effect. It was amazing to me because you mentioned it's not that great to be a white girl. It's not that great to be a girl right now. Where are the feminist groups talking about this who claim to be for the empowerment and the protection of young women? I mean, I know there are feminists who are doing that. J.K. Rowling, for example, speaking up about some of the just illogic of this movement. But it seems like feminism at large right now is all on board with transgender ideology at the expense of the safety and the well-being of girls. That's right. There are a few wonderful organizations, but very few. Women's

Liberation Front is very good on this. But most of the feminist organizations, it turned out, were more interested in being woke than in protecting young girls. So they've been silent on this issue and they can't wait to celebrate trans-biological boys who say they're trans women. They insist that they are really women. They can't wait to give away young girls hardened trophies and scholarships. They really, they were so fast to abandon girls. Wow. That's amazing.

Can you, can you give us any encouragement? This is very, it's discouraging for me to hear. It's discouraging for, I have a lot of moms that listen to this podcast, a lot of moms of young girls who are scared. They're doing their best, of course, too. protect their children. And I think that, you know, one positive of all of this is that moms and dads are waking up to this kind of stuff, that we can't just kind of idly watch our kids grow up and trust their schools to raise them and to provide them with the direction that we want them to. And so

hopefully parents are getting more involved. But can you give some encouragement or advice to parents who want to make sure that they are protecting and guiding their kids as wisely as they, as they possibly can. So I have a lot of encouragement and advice for parents in the book. And one thing I'll say is that the generation that was raising kids when the iPhone originally came out in 2007 had it really hard because they had no idea of the dangers of the iPhone, both how addictive, how isolating and how much anxiety and mental health distress they were producing in young girls.

We now have a mental health crisis among teenage girls that we can pretty precisely pinpoint to the introduction of social media, which is really tormented. them, you know, girls who always compared themselves to other girls. One thing parents can do is, first of all, they've got to get their kids off social media. These girls need to spend more time with friends in person talking. That's a big thing that we're missing today that's so important for young girls. They need to know that they're not alone, and social media doesn't give them that. Another thing is that parents need to be aware of the gender ideology being pushed in the schools, and they need to stop believing the lie that you need to push gender ideology in the schools

in order to stop bullying. It's simply not true. A school can oppose bullying of all and any children on any basis without introducing gender confusion into the schools. And how can parents speak up to their schools without, you know, I mean, a lot of them fear getting slammed or even fear having their lives ruined. Nowadays, it's just normal to docks people. and call them Karen because they say something that you don't like. Is there kind of a strategy that parents can employ to productively have a dialogue with school administration or the school board, whatever it is, about these kinds of policies? Well, that's why I wrote the book.

I wrote the book to provide that. I mean, the book is not political. It's not religious. I kept everything to do with those things out of it. It's just a journalistic, you know, skeptical exploration. And I talk to everybody. I talk to people on both. sides because I really wanted to investigate what was going on.

How are these girls faring? And what could we do about it? And that's what I did. I really hope to provide ammunition to helping parents fight for their girls. Can you tell everyone where they can purchase your book and where they can find you on social media? Sure. I'm on Twitter at Abigail.

Abigail Shreier on Twitter. And then the book can be purchased on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books a Million, wherever books are sold. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This was a great conversation. And I am loving your book. I'm reading it right now. And I know that there are going to be lots and lots of people who go out right now and order your book. Is it at, I'm guessing it's also at local bookstores that people can support and go out and buy the book as well. I think it is. I think it is. I haven't actually entered one in a while, but I think it is. Right. Well, I encourage people to do that. And maybe even instead of buying it on Amazon, just to support their local bookstore. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

It's such a great. It's great to talk to you, Allie. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives,

and we don't offer false comfort, we ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos.

If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts.

I hope you'll join us.