Shaun Newman Podcast - #1066 - Mia Hughes

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Mia Hughes is a prominent thinker, writer, and researcher specializing in paediatric gender medicine, psychiatric epidemics, social contagion, and the intersection of trans rights with women’s rights. She is the director of Genspect Canada, a Senior Fellow at Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), National Post contributor and the author of The WPATH Files, an investigative report based on leaked internal communications from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.Watch the Cornerstone Forum 26’https://shaunnewmanpodcast.substack.com/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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67th Street North, or you can give Diamond 7 meets a call today. 306, 825-9718. All right, the trip is coming up fast, okay? We leave July 5th. Nominate somebody from your community. Shoot me a text. You guys know who that interesting person is in your community. They could be...

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I'm talking about Mia Hughes. So buckle up, here we go. Well, welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Mia Hughes. Thank you, ma'am, for hopping on. Thank you so much for having me. Now, you've been suggested, you know, it's funny how the world works. You were getting suggested a bunch, and then, of course, it kind of just not falls in my lap,

Mia, I don't mean it that way, but it just, it kind of, things worked out, and here you are. But for a lot of people, I'm going to assume they don't know who you are. So how will we just start with a bit of your background? Tell the audience a bit about yourself. Sure. So right now, I am a senior fellow at the McDonald-Lurier Institute here in Ottawa. I live in Ottawa. And I'm also the director of Genspect Canada.

So with McDonald-Lurier, I largely focus on my writing and researches surrounding the scandal of pediatric gender medicine. So that's the practice of medicalizing adolescents. identities, young people who are right now swept up in this trans phenomenon who believe themselves to be members of the opposite sex and we put them on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even perform surgeries on these kids here in Canada. So that's where a large part of my focus is, but I do write and research and speak extensively on the wider medical scandal extending beyond just children and adolescents, the wider gender identity movement and the madness

of the trans rights era and the historical aspects, social contagion aspects as well. I was, I have a strange path into this particular career that I now have in that I was actually just minding my own business. I was a state home mother. I was left left, leaning. I was a little bit woke, embarrassingly. So homeschooling my three children when I just discovered, first of all, I, you know, I was aware of trans women of women. I went along with it just to be kind, but I didn't really believe it. And then I just became, it just entered my world. I'm not, I'm not directly hit by it. I don't have a child involved in this, but I just discovered what was happening to children in gender clinics or what was happening to adolescents in gender clinics.

And it made no sense. I saw, you know, an image of a 16-year-old girl or a teenage girl with mastectomy scars gashing across her chest. She'd posted it on TikTok or some YouTube or something. And I was horrified, I think, as any decent human being should be that we're chopping the healthy breasts of 16-year-old girls. And so I plunged into it. I became completely obsessed with understanding how such a crime could be on unfolding in plain sight. I researched social contagion, the science underpinning this medical scandal, which is atrociously weak. And just as I was learning, as I was making sense of it in my mind, I put the information that I was coming across on Twitter. I had a tiny Twitter account,

like a few hundred followers. And it seemed to really, it was helping me and it helped other people as well. My account grew really quickly. Eventually I wrote something. It's actually, it's on my Twitter account today because it's a topic of issue, but I wrote a thought experiment comparing people who want their healthy limbs chopped off to trans. And it was just, it was a thought experiment in a Twitter thread and Michael Schellenberger really liked it. And that day that the thread went viral in February, 2023, Michael Schellenberger gave me a job, asked me to write for him at his outlet public. And then shortly after that, Michael, while I was covering gender for Michael, somebody gave him what is now known as the W Path Files, which was a, Michael had just on the

Twitter files, you know, Elon had given him the Twitter files. And so someone gave him these documents from like leaked internal communications from the world professional association for transgender health. And Michael gave them to me and together we turned it into the story of this medical scandal built on the framework of those internal messages that we were given. Before we get into the W-Path files and social contagion, there's a bunch that I'm very curious. I was listening to you on, I can't remember the podcast, forgive me, folks. But you point directly to a day, December 19th, 2019, in a JK Rolling tweet.

You know, you're like, I'm embarrassed that I was left leaning. But I'm like, I actually find that very intriguing because I'm like, what is it that unlocks people from getting out of the narrative or the thought process they're in? Like, to me, that's very intriguing on this side. It is really interesting, isn't it? I find it endlessly fascinating. So you're right, it's December 19th, 2019.

J.K. Rowling had not entered the gender debate. This was the day she entered the gender debate on Twitter. And I was following, that was in my woke days. So I was following largely left-wing accounts. But I was also following Graham Linehan, the writer of Father Ted, who got viciously cancelled for defending women and opposing this medical scandal. And I was following a few other accounts.

Roling. And so when J.K. tweeted, I really should have this tweet imprinted in my mind because it was such a pivotal moment in my life, but unfortunately I don't. But she tweeted in support of Maya Forstetter. She was a woman in the UK who had lost her job because she basically said men are not women or something like that. And J.K. tweeted in support of her. And the tweet was gorgeously worded. I agreed with all of it. And I saw it wasn't so much J.K.'s tweet that gave me this identity quake where everything just collapsed around me. It was the reaction to JK's tweet because it was perfectly reasonable and trans activists like hundreds of thousands of people were losing their minds, calling her a transphobe, calling her a turf, which is a trans exclusionary radical feminist. It's a slur that is thrown at any woman who says men are not women. And I just, on that day, I realized, I had heard about turfs and I thought they were the most vile, disgusting, evil people because that's what my world was saying about them. And on that day, when everyone was calling J.K. a turf. And I agreed with J.K., I realized, goodness me, I'm a

turf. It was a really difficult moment for me because as well, all of my friend group in real life was woke and hated turfs and they were going mental about jk rolling and so i now realized that i was i was sorry i don't mean to interrupt but i'm like turf can you just explain the audience what a turf is i obviously live under a rock and i'm like turf just for the common person who's like what is mea talking about. Okay. So it means it tech that the the acronym means trans exclusionary radical feminist. But the thing about this, it's a slur or it was at the time, a slur that was used by trans activists to silence women to vilify any woman who disagrees with the, you know, the mantra trans women women or you know kids need to have body parts chopped off if they say that they're trans.

Any woman who disagreed with the rigid worldview of trans activists was and still is labeled a turf. But the interesting thing about the slur is that we, you know, that so many of us have been labeled turfs at this point. You just have to say only women have a cervix and they will viciously destroy you or try to destroy you by calling you a turf. And so they've created an army of turfs and we're all rather proud of it. I am extremely proud of being a turf because it means I stand up for women's rights. It means I oppose the

atrocious medical crime that is occurring in gender clinics. It means I stand up for homosexuals to have the right to be same-sex attracted and not, you know, lesbians are now expected to accept these blokes in their dating pool because if they don't, then they're transphobic. So I'm very proud of being a turf and I, and I'm everyone that I know also who is labeled a turf is proud of being a turf. But at the time in 2020, well, it was 2019, it wasn't easy. And it was, I had to come out as a turf in my real life to all of my woke friends. And I did that in 2020. And it was total chaos.

It was, I risked lose it. I was on the brink of losing all of my friends because I just turned into this evil genocidal transphobe in their minds. And so I did an unusual thing. Most people don't have a success story like mine. I decided, well, the friends that really mattered to me, this was COVID lockdown, bear in mind. The friends that really mattered to me, I set tea dates with them and I took a thermos of tea. I couldn't go in their house because we were on lockdown.

So we had to sit in their garden. And I went around my friend's houses with thermos of tea. And we sat in the garden and we talked about the issue. And I didn't lose a single one of those friends. I turned them all into turfs, which is great. But that's because decent people, when they're presented with the facts about this, decent people don't support it. The only reason decent people support this atrocious, atrocious medical crime

is because they don't understand it. And so I have a great success rate of convincing just normal people that this is wrong and that they should oppose it. I'm sorry, I think I've lost the thread. No, no, no. I tell you what, you think of small acts. Having tea in a garden is a pretty small act. And yet on the flip side, a very courageous one because you got to, I'm sure those

weren't comfortable conversations to enter into in the very beginning, right? Like, it's easy to look at it now and where the world is and how many voices are talking out about this. But, you know, back then, that wouldn't have been the case. And the tweet, I hope this is the right one. This is what J.K. Rowling tweeted on December 19th, 2019 was dress however you please, call yourself whatever you like, sleep with any consenting adult who you'll have you, live your best life and peace and security, but force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real. And then it said, I stand with Maya, Maya, and this is not a drill. Right.

It was, I'll be honest, one of the biggest moments for me in that tweet, because it is gorgeously worded, and I still agree with it all. But it was that last line as well. I remember she says, you know, forcing a job out of, force a woman out of her job for saying sex is real. My, I was fixated on that. I'm like, what does she even mean? Like, why can't you say sex is real?

And that was the day that I realized when they said trans women are women, they meant trans women are women. They meant that these men are actual women, the same as any other women. And you can't, you can't say that women are female. I was a busy stay-at-home mother. I was homeschooling my kids and I was a stay-at-home mother. And, you know, life is, you don't, I wasn't diving deeply into any of these political issues. When they said trans women are women, I genuinely thought nobody meant it. I didn't know we were supposed to believe that these men were actual women, that they'd

somehow change sex or that sex didn't matter or I don't even know. So back then you're sitting there and you're going, trans women are women, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. But you, in your mind you're going, they don't actually mean that. And that was the, that's the moment where you're like, holy crap, they actually think a man as a woman. Yeah, well, and not just that. You see, on the sex is real. I was kind of fixated on it. And then I start obsessively reading the replies to that tweet.

There were so many of them and it was trans activists going completely mental. But there were a whole bunch of trans activists replying or in all of the threads that were talking about it. There were trans activists fighting with lesbians and there were lesbians saying, we're not interested in people with penises and the trans activists were calling the lesbians transphobes. And it just blew my mind. I thought, goodness me, we've got the concept of the male lesbian here. Like, you know, a really like 1970s comedy club joke brought to life.

We've got people who believe that there are male lesbians. And then those people believe that actual lesbians, real lesbians, are transphobic for excluding these men from their dating pool. And on that day, it did still seem kind of unbelievable and clownish. I remember that day very well, but it was a very, it was just like maybe a day or two later that I find myself in the detransition world or the world of the medical scandal, what's happening to kids in gender clinics. And all of a sudden it became less clownish, less funny and very serious. And I could clearly see, you know, that this was a medical scandal. How could you not see? There's a 16 year old girl with them. She's had a mastectomy for what, for no reason at all. not medically necessary. And so that was the fixation for me. That's that's what changed my life. You know, it's funny. I was started the podcast in 2019, but certainly I was not talking about any of these things until probably 2022. I would say that'd be a fair assessment of if I go back

through the episode catalog of timelines. And I still remember thinking, like I kind of, I come from rural Saskatchewan and now live in essentially rural Alberta for all intensive purposes. And I think I'm saying this fairly to us that live away from the big centers. We just thought big centers are losing it. Like what are they what are they doing? But it's funny along the way it became a social contagion. I think that's probably the best term. I've heard you on a different interview or maybe it was actually a keynote address at a conference, you talked about extreme overvalued beliefs. And I thought we could explore that because I've been wrestling with rural people. And I would say on the large part, they would agree with

everything you've said. And yet you'll run into the odd person. And you're like, you literally deal with livestock, animals, right? And when you break it down to them in the sense of what they deal with on a farm, it's like you'd never enter into this thought process. And yet that big center idea or the larger cities that we used to kind of like snicker at like what are they doing you know i wouldn't have thought it would have spread and yet it has spread and it's become this idea that when you sit and talk to people you're like why is this so contentious why are they so put off by the idea that you know a man cannot become a woman that statement and you you'll watch people and you're like what what is going on and then i heard you talk about extreme overvalued

beliefs and I thought, man, I would love for you to share some thoughts on it with the audience. Sure. This is my latest explanation. Well, this is my latest obsession, I suppose. I've been in this for six years, just trying to make sense of everything. And the final piece of the puzzle, when just everything fell into place was when I came across this psychiatric concept called the extreme overvalue belief. But before I go there, I will say that, because, Because I'm, because I have a public figure in Canada speaking on this issue, I hear a lot from Canadians who are touched by this, whose family, mostly it's the kid, is, is hit by this scandal. And it does strike rural areas. It's not, it's, it's, it's everywhere. It is.

I should have put in the, the, I should have added to the story, right? Back then we weren't seeing it. But now you're seeing it leak into the smallest of areas. Yeah. Which I think, at the time I thought would never happen. And yet it has happened. So this is touching all parts of Canadian society. Yeah. Yeah. So you just need one activist ideologue in a school or in the public library or, you know, somewhere where they can bring the idea, the false belief, and then it just spreads. It's a social contagion, of course. We all know that by this point. But the extreme overvalue belief is fascinating because for a long time, like I would, I once interviewed this psychiatrist, his name is Azakeem, and I love him. He's great. He worked at the

Tavistock that's now closed. And I asked him, you know, are trans people mad? And he said, no, they're not mad. They're just confused and they've come to the wrong conclusion. They've latched onto this false belief that in a vulnerable state of mind, this belief that they are trans and that they need to medically alter their body makes complete sense to them. They kind of glom onto it. They fixate on it and then they pursue these medical treatments. And I just thought it was so fascinating. I read into the history of it and I realized that that's the answer to everything. So there's different types of mental illness. There's delusion, which we often think that, you know, these individuals are delusional. Like if a man thinks he's a woman and thinks he needs his penis chopped off, it is very

tempting to say that that's a delusion. But a delusion is the crucial part about a delusional. The delusion is it's idiosyncratic. It's individually held and it's bizarre and nonsensical. Like, you know, the CIA's implanted a mind control bug in my brain and they're controlling me. That's a delusion. No one else around you believes that and no one affirms it or celebrates it crucially. And then those obsessions, which we all know is obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is individuals who have thoughts that are very intrusive and distressing and they fight against them and they do compulsive behaviors to try and alleviate the distress. And again, you can see that trans is not that. But it's clearly not a sign of a sound mind to want your penis chopped

off. It's not a sign of good balanced mental functioned for a woman to want her breasts chopped off. And so framing it as an extreme overvalier belief fits perfectly. It's this is a psychiatrist to hear him on. defined this in 2019. And he says it's a rigidly held non-delusional conviction that the sufferer relishes and cherishes and and the community around them also shares this belief and also validates the belief and reinforces it. The individual doesn't realize that they have a mental illness. they think that the belief is entirely rational and justified and whatever goal the belief propels them to pursue, they think that that's entirely justified and normal. And so when I found this, I applied it directly to trans and think about it. Like these kids, they get diagnosed with gender

dysphoria, which is just a discomfort with your sex body. Like that's why there's a social contagion before I go any further, because the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is basically discomfort with your secondary sex characteristics, which is every kid going through puberty, which means every kid going through puberty is at risk of colliding with the belief that they are trans, and that's why they hate their secondary sex characteristics. And so these kids aren't identifying as having gender dysphoria. They're not identifying as, you know, having some poorly defined psychiatric disorder. They're not identifying as having a parapheria. They're identifying as trends, this new type of human being, and if you are trends, you need this medical treatment. And then

they pursue the medical treatment because that's what a trans-identified person needs. That's what they're told by their culture or their subculture. I would not call it a subculture in Canada. I would say mainstream Canadian culture pushes this false belief. pushes the false belief that some people are trends, that identity is perfectly healthy, and they need this medical treatment that's medically necessary and a human right. That is the false belief that the entire nation,

even rural areas, are currently swept up in. So you can think of it rather like a mass delusion. I know you can't call the individual person delusional because that has to be idiosyncratic, but you can call this moment, this moment a mass delusion where large swathes of the population believe something that is not true. And unfortunately, individuals are imbibing that false belief and then pursuing harmful medical treatments in its name. That's the extreme overvalued belief.

And when you go through a delusion, obsession, you may have had one other in there, very individual and not supported by the community at whole. When you come to the extreme overvalue belief, what gives it so much sway power, I don't know the word, you probably have a word, is that society has adopted it as it's true. And what I find even more troubling maybe, as much as that is troubling,

is a lot of people don't think it's true, but are scared to say anything about it for the repercussion of talking about it. Yeah. So it's like it's weird. It's weird. You see, that's part of it. So there's many layers to this. The extreme overvalued belief was actually the framework was developed by a forensic

psychiatrist because he wanted to understand extreme acts of violence. So when he developed this framework, he was thinking about those individuals who are in an internet echo chamber, they're all, they've all got, I don't know, very extremist right wing views whether they're anti-immigration and they go out and kill people for that reason, or you've got on the other side, you've got anti-Trump views and going out. The very extreme ideological beliefs, but in these internet echo chambers where everyone is just feeding each other and making the belief more extreme and then it just lands in someone's mind and they believe that they have to act, But the amazing thing about trends as an extreme overvalue belief is the entire nation of Canada is the echo chamber.

The entire nation of Canada for about 10 years at the very least, I would say, has forbidden anyone from questioning the idea, you know, the false belief that trends is natural and healthy and you need body parts chopped off, which is completely incoherent and nonsensical. anyway, but because we have this culture of, we have this climate of fear where people are just afraid to say what they know is true. Most people know that it is not the sign of a sound mind to want your penis chopped off, but because the worst crime you can possibly commit, according to trans activists, is to say that trans is a mental illness. And it goes, you see, we're in a terrible situation here in Canada as well, because obviously, you know, not only is our medical field. The field of gender medicine in Canada is entirely built upon this false belief that trans

is healthy and you need body part amputation, absurd. But also our governments, spineless, useless, cowards, whatever you want to call them, they embedded this idea into our laws. We've got gender identity as a protective characteristic written into our laws, where if anybody, we look at Barry Newfeld, the school board trustee from British Columbia, who got a $750,000 penalty to be got class-actions, basically, in a human rights tribunal. But if anyone even suggests that trans is a mental illness, which it is completely 100%, if anyone even suggests that, because we have gender identity protected, that can be considered discrimination,

all the rest of it, you can find yourself in a whole lot of trouble. And so because of that written into our law and because of the climate of council culture and then because the medical world is fully captured by this idea too, nobody is counteracting the false belief. Nobody's presenting the other side. We live in this nationwide echo chamber. And the downside, well, and there's another angle to this too, and that is when you pretend that this mental illness is a natural healthy trait, then you can celebrate it. And it's not really been that we've been, it's not just that we've been forbidden from calling it a mental illness, but we've also been required to celebrate this supposedly healthy identity. Like, look at what we do. We shower trans-identified people

with adoration. We celebrate anyone who announces a trans-identity. entity flying the flags all over the place. Everybody's got their pronouns in their bios. So it's not just that we can't criticize it, but it's forced participation and celebration of this very complex, difficult mental disorder. And that's what triggers the social contagion. And it just draws all of these young, impressionable, vulnerable, lost youth into the orbit of the belief.

and then they just, they latch onto it. And then because the medical world is fully captured, the medical world pumps them full of toxic drugs and chops body parts off them. I don't know if I've ever, hmm. Canada's an echo chamber is, I've got to think on that for a bit. When you think of, you know, like all of us each individually

having our echo chambers, right? You think of a population having its echo chamber. So obviously talking about it doing this is a way to break out of that echo chamber. When you look at it's embedded into laws and the climate of fear that you put words to, and I was pointing out earlier, you go, so how do we undo here in Canada what is going on when it's embedded in law? Yeah, that's the major problem we face is gender identity being embedded in law because I sound rather negative. about the whole thing obviously because it is the worst medical scandal in history and it is just an unbelievable mass delusion that it's very hard to break out of.

But the fact that it's in our law is our biggest hurdle. However, on a positive note, I will say I, because of what I do, because of what I do for a living and because of the nature of small talk, it's whenever I'm talking to Canadians from any walk of life in any situation, they will pretty much always ask me at some point very early in the conversation, what do you do? And I never hold back. I tell them exactly. I don't care who I'm talking to. I'm not ashamed of what I do. I'm proud of what I do. And so I tell Canadians. And I'm telling you now, I have never had a single one disagree with me. And over the years of conducting this social experiment of my own, it's gone from most people not having

any idea that it's happening and being horrified when I explain it, to most people having at least some idea that it's happening and evidently being desperate to talk about it, because the moment I say what I do, they start talking and they are desperate to understand the issue and they've been reading this and saw that and they understand that something really, really strange is going on. So I am convinced that Canadians, the general public, almost everyone is with us and if they're not with us right now you just need to give them the information which is you know what we're doing now we're having this conversation this reaches people and the people it reaches will then go and

talk about it I hope because we need a contagion of courage it does take courage even now to talk about it but if if ever we needed a contagion a social contagion of courage now is the time but I just I get this I feel it in Canada I feel the enormous shift. And our politicians, I have no forgiveness for them. Daniel Smith is the only one who can hold her head up high at the end of this. But our politicians eventually will catch up. They'll have to because if the general public is very much against this, then they're going to have to if they want to be voted in. I probably have did make some comments that I found quite promising just last week or the week before, the strongest comments. made yet. So it's not all doom and gloom to me. I actually have hope for Canada. Yeah, contagion of courage. I would add one in there, journalists, right? Like, they're talking directly to the public. And when they frame it only from one side and never give

voice to the other side, you know, like it's missing in the conversation. Certainly on this show, that isn't the case. We've had lots of different people come on to talk directly about it, but certainly it's missing there, right? We point to politicians, but there's the arm of the Canadian government called the CBC and elsewhere that doesn't shed light on this. Yeah, that's been a focus of mine for a long time. The politicians, yes, but a large, large part of the blame goes on our mainstream media. And I've, you know, I'm with the MacDonald Lurier Institute, I've written two, one big piece about the failings of the mainstream media. And then I actually, the Globe and Mail, I think it was last year, it must have been last year,

the Globe and Mail just published an atrocious. I mean, they published many atrocious pieces, so of all the outlets, but they published an especially atrocious piece. And I just, I wrote a formal complaint to them, pointing out everything that they got wrong and why it was dangerous to get such things wrong. I had it signed by 41 Canadian physicians, which is in and of itself, that's an act of courage if you're a medical professional in Canada and you put your name to something like this. And the Globe and Mail dismissed it. But I was thinking of resubmitting it because I'm sure you saw the Globe and Mail actually admitted its total failing on the unmarked grave mass

hysteria, which is so like trends. The parallels from the unmarked graves and trends. Very, very similar. It's just a kind of tiny, tiny example within the bigger trends example. And so I was thinking, in light of their admission, re-submitting my complaint and seeing if it gets me anywhere now. Yeah, I did see that. And I can, I've said this many a time on this show. There's certain topics in Canada. And if you don't live in Canada, you probably I don't get it. And the graves was one of them. I remember having both sides come on the show and being very uncomfortable with the conversation.

That's saying something as a man who's delved into the uncomfortable conversations of Canada. And the social contagion there is really another thing to behold, right? It's just, you know, like, can't we just have a discussion? And that's not the case, right? Like, I mean, it's changing. You point out with the Globe of Mail. I just read that this morning. I was like, wow, that is something.

So when you talk about them not even looking at what you've written, you go, you know, a contagion of courage. In journalism, we need that more than ever. Yeah, I can't remember how they worded it. They said something like, because they had accepted the confirmed, you know, this First Nations say we have 215 bodies confirmed, which was absolutely not true at all, then the Globe and Mail accepted that at face value.

And in their mere culper, they basically said, we have assertions need to be scrutinized. And I just think, look at the assertions that you just blindly accept of trans activists. You blindly accept that trans kids exist, for one, just like you blindly accepted that the unmarked graves and the dead bodies of children existed. you now blindly accept that trans kids exist when there's actually no more evidence for the existence of trans kids than there was for the graves.

They blindly accept that this treatment is evidence-based when it's clearly not. They blindly accept that it's life-saving when it's also clearly not. They call puberty block as fully reversible when there's evidence that that's completely false. There's all kinds of things that they blindly accept as well. And if they're in this spirit of admitting fault and admitting that they got something wrong, I think now might be the right time. I would agree. That would be something to see here in Canada.

The W-Path files, walk me through this. I remember following very closely the Twitter files when they were getting released. And my understanding is it's very similar to that, albeit a little bit different, but maybe you could walk me in the audience through that as well. Yeah, so the W-Path files, Michael packaged it as the W-Path files after doing the Twitter files, different in many ways in that for W-Path, it was, well, I mean, it was an internal messaging forum. They have this forum. First of all, I should say the World Professional Association for Transgender Health,

if any of your viewers think that this is a professional medical, Association, get that thought right out of your mind. There is nothing professional about these people. This is an extremist trans activist group, which frighteningly, many of the members have, you know, the licensed practice medicine. That's what W-opath is. And so they have, they're ideologically driven. They care nothing for evidence, nothing for science. It's all ideology. And they have this messaging forum. So what they do is they, the individuals who are treating trans identified people, so you'll have surgeons, therapists, endocrinologists, general practitioners, even emergency room doctors as well, I think. But anyone who encounters a transgender person,

a patient, but it's a difficult case, they'll often go into the forum and say, I've got this patient, he's homeless and schizophrenic, and he wants his, well, they'll say she wants her testicles or she wants surgical castration or whatever. And they're asking the group for advice. But there's a pattern in the W-Path files that leaps out at you immediately is it doesn't matter what the situation is with this patient. It doesn't matter how many mental health diagnoses this person has. It doesn't matter if the person is homeless.

Doesn't matter how old the person is. All of the answers will always be, yes, that person can have surgical castration. Yes, that person can have hormones. Yes, that person is ready for vaginoplasti, having the penis chopped off. It's just a kind of climate of affirmation, obviously, because like I said, their ideological and affirmation is the only possible option if you live in this world guided by the false overvalue belief that trans is healthy and medical. intervention is the only possible way to help these people. There's no, when you live in that

world, there's no other framework. There's nothing else you can do. You can't help the people. That's conversion therapy. You can't investigate why they've come to the conclusion that they need their penis chopped off. That's bigotry. That's transphobia. The only thing you can do is chop the penis off. And so W Pathfiles, it was just a broad, broad range of W-Path-Path people with bizarre cases and then the interesting thing that's really important to understand about the climate inside W Path and it's very evident in the W Path files is it's not just medical professionals they have the the group is open to anyone who has an interest in trans identified issues or gender medicine or whatever so

you can just have like straight up activists or people who are trans identified and they're in the group. So they're always in there saying, oh, well, I did this and I took that and I recommend this. And because of the hierarchy within the group, if you are trans identified, your comment holds far more weight. You know, if it's a, I remember there's a conversation, it's a teenage girl and she's on testosterone. She ends up at the emergency room because testosterone dries out, it causes vaginal atrophy and uterine atrophy. And this teenage girl had ended up in the emergency room with bleeding because of this vaginal atrophy. And I think there was some kind of, then there were discussions about how, you know, many of the patients, many of these young

girls end up having severe pain and severe discomfort and they can't have penetrative sex because of the pain. And then a whole bunch of trans-identified women who are on testosterone show up into the group and start saying, oh, well, I did this and it was really effective. And the other one will say, okay, I did this and this was really effective. And so think about that conversation. Even if there were, and there's not, I'm quite sure, but even if there were someone inside W-path who had a moment of, hang on a minute, should we be giving these girls testosterone, given the side effects, like look how terrible this is. They couldn't possibly say that because they're in the presence of women on testosterone who would take that as, you know, bigotry, transphobia,

take it as a personal attack. So the very existence of all these trans-identified people and all these activists on the inside shuts down any real scientific conversation, any real ethical conversation, because nobody's allowed to deviate from this very rigid worldview that these people have. Am I right in thinking, you know, I got young kids. And when you have young kids and you have, you know, the plethora of different things that come up with, I don't know, obviously I didn't breastfeed, but, you know, my wife breastfeeding or different things. You go, there's like groups on Facebook. And I can't even begin to list them off.

But you go in, you look for answers and then they kind of, you know, and you, you know, okay, oh, I hadn't tried that before. This is something like that. Put out as a professional group, so you're talking to professionals. And it's, but instead of there being any sort of like maybe you should just back off from this, et cetera, et cetera, those thoughts, even if they were there at the start, have certainly been removed so that it is a very tight echo chamber. of like, I don't know, people looking for answers going through something that I can't even,

I can't even begin to fathom, to be honest. And that's what they've cultivated. Yeah, I mean, on the subject of echo chambers, again, W-Path truly is the most insulated echo chamber you could possibly imagine. They do not allow any deviation from, they are responsible. W-Path is largely responsible for this overvalued belief, this idea that trans is healthy and medical interventions. These hormones and surgeries are medically necessary and life-saving and a human right. That's the guiding principle of W-path. That is the core foundational belief of W-Path and nobody on the inside is permitted to deviate from that. It's important. possible you can't deviate from that so that means you can never actually help any of the individuals

who who find themselves in the care of one of these members because in my mind how you actually help these people young or old i mean everybody everyone always talks about doing this to kids and how terrible that is but frankly i think it's a it's a medical scandal all the way for everyone because no one is actually getting the help that they need in the sense that nobody is being helped to understand what it is that drove them to seek this medical treatment. Nobody is making a medical, drastic life-altering medical decisions with an understanding of what their condition even is. They just think that they're a new, brand new type of human being that was just discovered in the 21st century. And then they're making these

medical decisions that cannot be informed because informed consent requires that you are informed, of what your diagnosis is, of what the treatment options are. They're not being informed about any of that. They're just being, they self-identify or they self-diagnosed, but really it's not even a diagnosis because we pretend it's healthy. So they self-identify as a type of human being that doesn't exist. They find themselves in the hands of these doctors who believe in this type of human being that doesn't exist,

and then they get put on a medical pathway that has precisely, zero decent evidence to support it and no scientific justification. And then the cherry on top basically is they don't do any follow-up. So they do this reckless experiment on all of these healthy people and then they don't perform any follow-up to see how they're doing. And then they constantly say to the media, oh, nobody regrets it. Well, of course no one regrets it because you're not following anyone. It's easy to have a 0% regret rate.

you follow 0% of the people. If you actually followed all of these people, I think you would find a much higher detransition, regret. Even we have a study out of Sweden. There were a few studies like this, but the Swedish one is the most famous in that they did a registry study where they looked at the national records and they followed, they looked at what happened to every single person who went through this medical pathway, hormones and surgeries. These were adults. They looked at every single one in the nation and they found that the the men had, um, it was 19 times higher suicide rate compared to the general population and the women had 40 times higher suicide rate than the general population. And that's just the suicide. Then there was

higher rates of death by all kinds of, you know, health issues because this is a medical treatment that destroys health rather than improves health. It's not actual medicine in the sense of improving health or alleviating suffering. So they've got high mortality, they've got high suicide rate, and they didn't even capture regret because it was just a registry study. And so when you actually look at the numbers, the very idea that there's a 1% regret rate is ludicrous. Epic failure, right?

When you go 19 times for men and 40 times for women. Yeah. And the amazing thing is the really, really astonishing thing is it's not that they just say, oh, no one regrets it. They actually say that this is life-saving care. Life-saving care when you've got a 40 times higher of suicide rate, how is that life-saving? You haven't saved their lives. You may be, well, it's hard to say why those people.

You don't know why they committed suicide. You can just see that there is a 40 times higher rate. And that surely means you can't call it life-saving care. You had a, you talked about an interesting analogy. Going back to the keynote I watched you, discuss. And it was talking about a man-saving, drowning kids, I believe, in the river. I thought it was, you know, like, and then all of a sudden it's so many and like, well, maybe I just need to get out of the river and go upstream and see what's going on. When you talk about what is driving them, do you come all the way back to this extreme overvalue belief?

Is that the start of all this, pushing all the, you know, using the analogy of kids drowning in a river? Is that where you go to or is there something further upstream where you're like, we got to circle this as Canadians, we got to stare at this and we're, got to get to the bottom of it. Yeah, I go with the belief. So the parable, it's actually a very well-known parable in the medical world, and it is exactly what you say. So it's a man walking along the side of the river, and he hears someone crying for help, and he wades in, and he pulls the person out, and then another person goes by and another, and he's just, you know, pulling people out of the river, and he starts to get exhausted, and then he realizes, you know, that he needs to go upstream and find out what's causing all of these people to fall in the river.

When I did my talk, I framed it as a monster. It can be like a broken bridge or something and everyone's toppling in, but I framed it like a monster because I wanted to portray the seriousness of this false belief. So what I believe is drawing people in, I made it clear that it's not actually these doctors who've lost their moral and ethical compass who are throwing people into the water. It's we've got to go one step beyond that. And we've got to look at the belief that trends is a way to be a person, basically.

The belief that trends is a healthy, new type of human being and that you need these medical treatments. That is what is seducing all of these people. Because the belief is there and it's loose in our culture. Trans is healthy. And anyone who is trans needs these medical treatments. But the type of people who are drawn to that belief, I move in this world, I have done for years and years, and I have never met a detransitioner or an honest, open, trans-identified person who says, I was happy and thriving in my life and then I adopted a trans identity. Never. The people who are drawn in by this belief, this idea that they might be a member of the opposite sex, are people who are struggling for various reasons. There's a, an awful lot of trauma, there's depression, there's anxiety, there's autism, astronomically high rates of autism. And then there's just puberty. Oh, well, there's same-sex attraction,

people coming to terms with their same-sex attraction and feeling very uncomfortable with it. And then there's just the discomfort of puberty. It's a difficult time. You're feeling very awkward. You do dislike your body. All of these groups in society, you know, let's just say they're milling around the riverside and then they come across the idea that trans is a type of person. Now, trans is a particularly seductive belief because it sells them the promise that they can be someone new. You hate who you are right now for one of those various reasons or many others, and it sells you the idea that you can transform into someone new. And the way that the social contagion has worked, and we've seen this play out on YouTube, we've seen it, there's evidence of it, is the young people come across someone who's just like them. And they can be like a, you know, a young 12, 13 year old girl or something on YouTube and she's announcing that she's trans and that she's taking testosterone and that she was really uncomfortable and depressed and miserable before.

And now she's on testosterone and she's really happy. And she's got thousands of followers and she gets all of these likes and she's showered with adoration. And the young person looking at that thinks that's just like me. And if I must be trans too. And if I do this medical treatment, I'm going to be happy and bouncing around with all this music and everybody's going to be liking my posts and following me. And as well that they're often, the tragedy of it is, they're often so socially isolated. whatever difficulty it is that they're having often comes with social isolation. They're not fitting in with their peers very well.

And that's another thing that makes it so alluring is you announce a trans identity and then you get welcomed into this trans community. And you do rather get love bombed like in a cult. There's a whole lot of love bombing, which the young person, it's very intoxicating to a young person who's had a really difficult time. Teenagers, adolescents, they are craving social acceptance and they're craving a tribe. They want to find their tribe. And when they announce a trans identity and they get this welcoming tribe and they really finally feel happy, they mistake that for finding their true self. They're like, okay, I felt terrible before. Now I'm trans and I feel

great. This is who I truly am. So now I need to do all of these medical treatments. The problem is all of it is false. Absolutely all of it is false. This new type of person, trans doesn't exist. What does exist is the idea, the false belief that is leading all of these people in. And it's a kind of push and pull. It evolves in lockstep because once enough people identify as trans, medicalize their body, then it brings into existence a category of person. that we can now call trends, and that draws in more susceptible young people as well. And so really all I've been saying, and it's a very controversial thing to say in Canada, and it shouldn't be, is we need to go back, we need to get rid of all of that,

get rid of the false belief, get rid of the idea that this is a new type of person, and it's perfectly healthy. You just need to have your body parts chopped off, and you'll be, you know, you'll live along and happy life. We need to just get rid of all of that because it's dangerous. And then we need to understand this phenomenon for what it truly is, which is just, it's a mental illness. And that doesn't mean stigmatize. It doesn't mean discriminate against. It doesn't mean, you know, some people accuse me of all kinds of crazy things like genocide and wanting to exterminate trans people. None of that's true. I just want to I want the people treating trans-identified people to understand the patients for who they truly are and for I want the patients to understand what's motivated them to seek this medical treatment. I don't think anyone should be making medical decisions because they believe that they're a fictional type of person that doesn't even exist. You need to understand yourself and you need to try and a very very

the need for these medical treatments. The very idea, right now we're framing it as if this medical treatment is a human right. And if we deny this medical treatment, we are violating the person's human rights. I actually think it should be a human right to obtain safe, evidence-based medical treatments that are going to improve your life, not some reckless insane experiment with just based on ideology with no scientific justification at all. That's a violation of your human right, I think. Sorry, what was that? Is that me? It is me. Sorry, here we go. I just makes me sad on this side. I'm trying not to be depressed because,

Mia, what you've been talking about is just, it's heavy, right? Like you think of, we live in this world that is more connected than ever. Right? Like you can just do exactly what we're doing. And yet, somehow we've become more isolated all at the same time to think, you know, all kids go through puberty. And those are confusing times at the best of times. And to have, man, it's just a heavy, a heavy thing. I don't know, I don't know if I have any better thought than that. I just, I'm listening.

I'm like, man, this is, it's tough. Yeah, and part of, I mean, part of the problem of being so connected is that these bad ideas, these contagious ideas and false beliefs spread so much faster. Yeah. I mean, social contagion has long been observed. It's not a new phenomenon at all. It long predates the internet era, but it's, it has social contagions have the ability to go global very, very fast. And of course that's what we've seen with trans.

However, well, I think we're all learning slowly the dangers of the internet. I feel bad for the generation. What generation would it be, Gen Z who we didn't understand the dangers of it and we just left them to it. And those are the ones that really got hit by this contagion hard. I would hope that on many levels, not just trends and not just social contagion, but I would hope at this point on many levels we're understanding the importance of kids having real embodied childhoods. And frankly, I have three adolescents. So I understand how difficult it is to get your adolescent off the screens. But it is, you know, I tell my kids, I want you to just go out and

be bored and talk about nothing. And that's what they should be doing, right? That's when you have the best ideas and the most fun. I 100% agree. I joke with my oldest all the time. You're bored? Grab a broom, start sweeping. I bet you're going to find some things to go do instead of doing that. Yeah. You know, like bored is something I think we grew up with and you had to go out and find things to entertain yourself with. And man, I appreciate you coming on. If people wanted to find your work, follow along with what you do. Obviously, they can find you on X, but is there other things you'd point them to? Yeah, sure. All of my Canadian writing, most of my pieces, my op-eds end up in the National Post. I have longer form essays as well that I've written from MacDonald Lurier. So I have,

there's just a page we've put in my name and MacDonald Lurier Institute. All of the writing that I've done about Canada, you can find on that page. And I think there's a few interviews as well. I'll put my name into YouTube and you'll find many, many interviews just like this one. And then with GenSpect, my writing with GenSpect is far more on the broader issue, the extreme overvalue belief, the history of this and the wider, analyzing the cultural moment far broader in a more broad sense. And then I have a podcast, which I always forget to plug, but it's called Beyond Gender. It's very small. We just started it, but it's very interesting, and we have a wide range of guests, lots of great topics.

Well, I appreciate you coming on and doing this. Please keep doing what you're doing. Here in Canada, it's strange times at the best of times, and appreciate voices like yourself. Thank you so much.