The Daily Signal - Mary Margaret Olohan Pulls Back Curtain on ‘Gender Ideology Cult’

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

The cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries being prescribed to young people struggling with their gender identity are “experimental,” according to Mary Margaret Olohan.  “We don't actually know what kind of effects that the puberty blockers and hormones are having on these young people,” Olohan says of women and men who attempt to change their bodies to appear as the opposite sex.  In her new book “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” Olohan shares the stories of detransitioners, such as Prisha Mosley.  As a young woman, Mosley took testosterone and had a double mastectomy before she chose to detransition and return to living as a female. Now an adult, she is expecting a child, but will never be able to breastfeed her baby.  “I'm very happy for her and glad to see that she is able to bring new life into the world,” Olohan says of Mosley, but added that “we don't know if other people will be able to do the same. ” “There are people who have found that they are infertile now, due to the testosterone or the hormones” they took, she says. Olohan, who is also a senior reporter for The Daily Signal, joins the podcast to explain how so many young people are being lured into the “gender ideology cult,” and what happens to a male or female body when taking cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, May 10th. I'm Virginia Allen. Daily Signal senior reporter Mary Margaret Ollahan has been covering the transgender movement for years. And when stories started coming out about young people choosing to detransition, Mary Margaret felt compelled to share their stories with the world. And that is what she has done in her brand new book, D-Trans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. She joins us in a moment to share the stories of detransitioners whose lives and bodies were forever changed by the gender ideology cult. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. The Heritage Foundation is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country.

Every semester, our interns are a vital part of that mission. We pay competitively. We develop talent. And we give our interns access to some of the sharpest minds in the country. We're going on offense, so join us. To learn more about the Young Leaders Program here at the Heritage Foundation, please go to heritage.org slash intern. Mary Work at Olihan, thank you so much for being here.

It's a joy to have you. Thank you. I feel so honored to be a guest here. I guest in your home studio in many ways here at the Daily Signal. Well, I do want to give a quick disclaimer before we start. I want this to be a very honest conversation. We're talking about a heavy issue, detransitioners, the transgender movement.

And so it is likely going to be a bit graphic, just for anyone listening. Please do be aware of that. But Mary Margaret, I'm thinking back to the summer of, I think it was summer of 2022. You called me and you said, hey, I think I have an opportunity to write a book. And you are really excited. And at that point, it was a thought. It was a dream. It was a maybe.

And now the fact that we actually have the copy, the hard copy, you have the pre-copy, because you're the author. So you get an early copy, but of the book, Detrans. It's so exciting to have seen this vision come to fruition. Share with us how this started. What made you decide, I want to tell the stories of detransitioners? Well, first of all, Virginia, you've been so supportive, so this is so fun to do the interview now. I first encountered detransitioners online on Twitter, I guess, and I was looking for their stories because at the time, we knew that people were going through this type of thing. We knew that kids were becoming victims of this gender ideology cult, but we didn't have a ton of evidence. And I remember when I was at the Daily Caller, I was looking

for stories of people who had been harmed by these gender transitions or so-called gender transitions. And so I was keeping an eye on social media for different people. And I remember seeing Helena Kirshner pop up. And Helena is one of the girls in my book. And her testimony is amazing. I wouldn't say she's a philosopher. She's just really intellectual. She really deep dives into the motivations and the causes and the, just the background of all of this. And I included a lot of that in my book. So Helena was one of the first people I noticed online.

I started following her. I started following some of the other people she was encountering and seeing more and more testimonies of people who had detransitioned. And where I really got into the nitty gritty was one day I stumbled on this. Twitter spaces event. And that was just like a whole bunch of detransitioners who got into the same space and were talking about what the hormones had done to them. And I think I was the only reporter in there.

They were just chatting about their experiences, but I had never heard any of this before. They're talking about the psychological effects that hormones had on them, on their bodies, on their brains. And I was sitting there and I was like listening to this as I made dinner for myself. And I thought, this is like sci-fi. Wow. This is like, nobody knows about this. And if people knew, they wouldn't be calling this care.

And all these people were anonymous, right? And it was also confusing listening to this Twitter space because someone would speak with a really deep voice and then say, oh, by the way, I'm actually a woman. And someone would speak with a feminine-sounding voice and then would reveal themselves to be a man biologically. And so, you know, I got off of that Twitter space event and I thought, I really want to cover this, but I'm not totally sure how. and I had so much going on at the time that I kind of had to let it go. But it stayed in my mind, and I was thinking about it a lot. And as some time passed and some of these detransitioners became more vocal, I started reporting on it. And then when I got an opportunity to write a book, I immediately knew I wanted to tell the stories of detrans.

So powerful. Well, the book is Detrans, true stories of escaping the gender ideology cult. It's available right now for pre-order. It's officially out on May 28th, just around the corner. So go ahead, pre-order it now. for those Mary Margaret that you have spoken to, that you interviewed for your book, what is usually the reason and the journey for them deciding I want to transition? I'm not comfortable in my body with my sex, whatever it might be.

So a lot of this starts on social media, but I will say the detransitioners that I spoke with had a lot of things in common. For starters, many of them were really lonely. They felt like they didn't fit in at school. They either were on the spectrum or they suspected that they were on the spectrum. or they suspected that they were on the spectrum, which is super common with young people who identify as transgender.

Many of them had a troubled family life. So, for example, one girl had an alcoholic mother. Another girl had parents who were going through a divorce. Another girl had siblings that were older, so she felt kind of alone. She didn't have a lot of community at home. And when they were at school, they didn't really fit in. They didn't have a ton of friends.

They didn't really know who they were or what they were supposed to be, which is, by the way, generational crisis. It's not just young people with gender dysphoria that are struggling with their identity. It's a civilizational, actually, I would say, crisis right now. People who don't know who they are, what they're supposed to be doing, or why they're even on this earth.

But anyways, so these young people, the detransitioners in my book, would go searching for meaning online. And a lot of the time, the girls especially, they get online, they're quickly exposed to pornography, They're quickly exposed to gender ideology. They're quickly exposed to really aggressive depictions of femininity. And I found this really interesting because the girls, for example, they're looking for who they're supposed to be, right?

Like we all did this when we were younger. We see older girls that impress us when we want to be like them. But Chloe, for example, goes online, and she sees these women on Instagram who are super sexual. You know, they post these photos of themselves and get hundreds of thousands of millions of likes and interactions and male attention, and they have these super curvy bodies,

and they just look so beautiful and have these perfect clothes and go on these exotic vacations. So someone like Chloe is thinking, wow, is that what a woman is? Because that doesn't look like something I can be. She doesn't look like me. I don't think I can do any of that. And this is Chloe Cole that you're talking about.

Yeah, Chloe Cole, for example. And then combine that with being exposed to pornography at a young age, which many, many, many children are. In fact, if your child has a smartphone and you're not monitoring their usage of it, it's highly likely that they've been exposed to pornography already. And so we know that the depictions of women in pornography are very degrading and humiliating. And when you're a young girl and you're watching that, some of these D-transitioners told me, A, it doesn't look fun for the women, looks fun for the men,

and B, it looks scary and like it hurts and just degrading. So when you combine those things, the girls are left thinking, A, being a woman looks like nothing that I am, you know, those very glitzy pictures on Instagram. That's not me. And B, it looks scary and degrading and humiliating. And I don't think I want any part in that. So it just makes it too easy for the gender ideology aspect to come in where you're looking for identity. And these activists say, well, you don't think you're a woman.

Maybe it's because you're a man. Or you don't feel like you fit in. Maybe it's because you're supposed to be in a man's body. And then from there, things quickly escalate. And that's, you know, that's a girl's perspective. Sure. It doesn't apply to every case. But I did find that very worrisome, and it did come up repeatedly when I was talking to some of these people.

So they go to their doctor. They say, I'm not feeling comfortable in my own body. I don't want to, for a girl, I don't want to be a woman anymore. What is then the medical process that that doctor starts them on? I know puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones. What does that look like? What are the side effects? What's the timeline usually?

So what will all. often happen is these young people in high school will be meeting with a therapist or a counselor, and they'll get referred to a gender therapist who will affirm that they are in the wrong body and that they should be going through a transition. And that gender therapist will give them a prescription for, you know, somewhere that they can get testosterone or estrogen. But let's say we're talking about a girl here because that's pretty common. This girl will want to get testosterone. And so they'll either help facilitate that or they'll give them a recommendation on somewhere to get it. For Helena, for example, one of the girls in my book, she knew she couldn't get testosterone close to her.

So she drove to Chicago to a Planned Parenthood to get testosterone. And I include this in my book. We talk about her intake forms, the very easy process. All she had to do was fill out this intake form. She told him she hadn't been suicidal for two weeks and that was good enough for them to prescribe. her testosterone. Wow. Just, you know, two weeks ago she was.

But now she's fine enough to get testosterone and start injecting herself. So they prescribe it to her. She gets the green light. She drives to the CVS and picks up her prescription and goes home. And that's it. She's got it. So she'll start taking that. And this is, you know, these young people will be taking it every day, high dosages.

It quickly affects your bone density, your muscle growth, your muscle growth, your fat distribution. You know, when you're taking testosterone as a woman, it's going to cause your fat to redistribute in a more masculine way. You're going to have increased hair growth, hair loss, just your skin will get more coarse, less soft, lots of different physical effects. Things you wouldn't necessarily think of right away. Yeah. And then some of the emotional effects are really disturbing. For example, the girls will feel really increased rage that they haven't felt before, really increased sexual urges that they haven't felt before that are very confusing for them. Prisha Mosley, one of the girls in my book, lost the ability to cry, which she found really scary.

You know, you just, you feel this really intense urge to find relief from crying and you can't. And then, you know, Prisha lost the ability to sing. She had a really beautiful voice and liked to sing Phantom of the Opera and just that went away. And so, you know, these are just some of the side effects of the to, So they're taking this and the next step is surgery. And so thankfully some of the people desisted before they got to that point. Helena, for example, was doing so badly on testosterone that she realized I have to stop. This is hurting me.

And she did. And then she ultimately detransitioned right before she had gotten a double mastectomy. Not a lot of the other detransitioners did not get to that point. Yeah. Chloe Cole and Prisha Monsley and Luca Hiner, three different girls that are in my book, and they all got double mastectomies. They all regretted these double mastectomies.

And through varying lengths of time, right? Like Luca got her double mastectomy and then began taking testosterone. She was on it for four years before she realized, oh my gosh, I'm not better, I'm not happier. I'm struggling even more intensely, and I have to stop, and this was all a lie. Chloe has told me that her wounds from her double mastectomy haven't fully healed, and it's been years. She's still suffering the side effects of those surgeries.

And, you know, thankfully, these girls, that's as far as they went. But theoretically, if you're on this trajectory, you're supposed to get a hysterectomy. You're supposed to get your uterus removed because you're a man. You're not supposed to have a uterus. And also, if you really want to keep going, you're supposed to get fake male genuette. genitalia made out of your intestines in some cases attached to you, which obviously does not work, right? We're talking about fake limp organs that do not work and are attached to you. And for the men, very similarly and incredibly grotesquely, we're talking about making fake caverns

to try and make fake female genitalia. and these caverns have to be what they call it dilated to keep the wounds from healing or closing. And that is incredibly disgusting and grotesque too. Because the body's trying to heal itself and close. Right. Because it's saying there shouldn't be a hole here. Yes. And the body's recognizing this is not supposed to be here.

And this part, we need to heal this because it's wrong. You know, it's just like the biology is recognizing this should not be here. and so if you are a person who identifies as a transgender woman and you're trying to keep this this fake female genitalia in place yep vocal we can call that me to say it what it is then you have to keep it open and we did a really horrible story here at the Daily Signal recently on a woman that was imprisoned with a man who identified as a woman who had a vagina fake vagina situation like this and he was dilating himself underneath her in their bunk bed. And that's just, that was a really disgusting story. But I think it really drives home how, just how disgusting these kinds of things can be and how wrong. And I'm very thankful for the girls in my book and for the men in my book that they did not get to these points.

They were not put through these kinds of things because it's just so wild Virginia that they're being told to do these things. out of a desire to make them happier or to make them feel better. And it's just so counterintuitive. Like you don't make a fake hole in your body to help you feel better. You don't put yourself through intense pain and discomfort and suffering for what end, you know? So I'm rambling a little bit, but. Well, it's powerful and it's sobering. It's really sobering.

To what extent can the damage be reversed if someone has, taken cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers for a year and they stop, can they just sort of pick back where they left off in the natural biological cycle of life and puberty can restart if they're young and they haven't gone through it yet? And if they've taken cross-sex hormones, can the effects of those go away? We're still finding out. We don't totally know. And that's one of the craziest parts of this is that these hormones and puberty blockers

and the surgeries are experimental. But they're described as something that can stop young people from committing suicide, which is a lie. And actually it is a very big lie and very manipulative lie that's used to trick parents into transitioning their kids. Yeah. But we don't actually know what kind of effects that the puberty blockers and hormones are having on these young people. In some cases, people are able to resume normal lives, but not fully. Prisha Mosley, for example, is due any day to have a baby, which is so exciting.

Prisha was on testosterone for a while. She also underwent a double mastectomy. Didn't know if she could ever get pregnant again or have a baby. And she is, but she's had complications. I believe she has to have a C-section. And so I'm very happy for her and glad to see that. that she is able to bring new life into the world, but we don't know if other people will be able to do the same.

There are people who have found that they are infertile now due to the testosterone or the hormones they're taking. And unfortunately, for Prussia, she won't be able to breastfeed her baby. And that wasn't something that she was able to fully give informed consent to when it happened, given that she was going through intense mental health struggles and was a kid. Yeah. You think about for young women, they're not thinking about, like, maybe they've thought, do I want to have a kid?

Right. Do I want a breastfeed? I mean, that's something that you usually don't really think about until you are in a season where you're thinking about having kids. Right. It's not something that I think a lot of women think about until maybe they're about to get married or they're about to have a baby. And, you know, some of these girls had never held hands with a guy when they started down this path. They had never kissed anyone when they started down this path. And yet the therapists or the doctors in their lives are urging them to make choices based on supposed sexual preference when they don't know any of this.

Yeah. And they shouldn't. They're kids. Which brings me to the question of the doctors. Did you speak with any of the doctors who've done these surgeries? They are very careful not to talk to media. I tried to, especially the doctors, you know, who are named in the lawsuits or the doctors who I was able to contact through the detourgings. Transitioners, they are very careful not to talk to media.

Okay. But I reached out to many of them and I tried to get in touch with them. I have many questions I would like to ask them. I'm sure a lot of them would say that, you know, they aren't that close to the situation. They're just doing the surgery. But imagine being one of those doctors and going home at night and you lay down and you're going to sleep and you're thinking about your day and you remove the healthy breasts from like four girls that day. Yeah.

I mean, when you think about the oath that doctors take to do no harm and the fact that, like you said, they're removing perfectly healthy body parts. And it's hard to understand how that that can compute in their hearts and minds. Yeah. And I think it's actually very, very scary, not just in the context of this conversation, but everyone should be scared that our medical professionals have. chosen to prioritize ideology over facts and over science. We already saw this happen during COVID, right? Yeah. But now we're seeing doctors who are willing to pretend, they're willing to suspend reality and pretend that someone is actually a boy and treat them medically as though they are.

And that is freaky to me. And I'm specifically thinking of this story that Helena told me when she was struggling really badly on testosterone. And she checked herself into a hospital in Chicago. And the doctor's there. I gave her her intake forms and stuff and asked her to fill it out. And she told them that she was a boy. And she gave them the name that she was going by at the time.

And her he-him pronouns that she was going by at the time. And those doctors, instead of medically treating her as a girl who was on testosterone and was having side effects that needed to be treated. they treated her as if she were a guy that came in that had mental health problems. Oh, boy. So, and I know it sounds like simple, but I think it's a big deal. It's worth examining because they're pretending that she is someone else, first of all, and they're ignoring the substance that she's taking that is making her actually suffer so much.

And that story to me, I remember when she told me that the first time, I was, I went over the details multiple times with her because I was like, how is that possible? Was there no one that was like, you know what? Like we get that she identifies this way, but she's biologically a woman and we should probably take her off testosterone because she's suffering so much. Yeah. And she was like, no. No one. So no one, no one was willing to just put their foot down and say, hey, here's the reality here.

We're all medical professionals. We know what's going on. Like our oath is to do no harm. Here's how we can help her. But no. So, and I think that that type of story should scare everyone because that's our medical professionals who took an oath to do no harm to, you know, treat and to help people to become better, purposefully ignoring the source of something for ideological reasons. And that's incredibly scary. You mentioned parents a moment ago.

And of course, this is a really, really hard topic for many parents to navigate. And as you said, a lot of parents are told you have a choice. You either transition your kid or they're going to commit suicide. That's impossible. But when you talked to the detransitioners that you interviewed for your book, did they share it all about the role that their parents were playing in their journey and whether they had conversations with their parents about this? Yes and no.

I would say that most of the detransitioners I talked to were really respectful of not trying to, A, throw their parents under the bus, and B, involve them too much. Because I think, unfortunately, we have two situations here, right, where on the one hand, there are evil and narcissistic men and women who purposefully transition their children out of a desire to promote themselves. And I think a good example of this is, like, you know, the mom that posts on Instagram about her toddler being trans. That's about her.

That's not about the kid. Yeah. And that's her pushing this. ideology on her child. And when people call that out and condemn it, I think they're very correct to do so. You also have another population of parents who are just your average secular American parent, who's not super religious, not paying a ton of attention to politics, kind of going with the flow, doing their thing, and they're not equipped with the political or the cultural awareness or knowledge to kind of confront this gender ideology.

And so when their kid comes to them and says, I'm a boy, you have to call me a boy now. And they seek professional help. The medical professionals say, your child needs gender affirming care, which is a euphemism, we know, and it's not actually care. And it means transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers. Your child needs gender affirming care. And if you don't give it to them, then you hate them and you're not affirming them and they might do something worse. and what Chloe, Prisha, Luca, and Helena all told me unable, all these individuals in my book,

was that their parents were told, would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son? And that was told to parents who were hesitating and saying, I feel like a double mastectomy is not the answer to my daughter's mental health problems. I feel like going on testosterone is not the answer to all the suffering that she is going through right now. but the doctors and therapists will give them this line and the parents love their children. Maybe they're not, maybe they're not the smartest people in the world for trusting these professionals, but they love their kids and they're scared and they don't know what to do.

And they're sitting there saying you're the one with the degree, not me, so I guess I'll trust you. Right. And when I say this, I don't want to take, I don't want to take away just blame here, you know? Sure, sure. Many of these parents have a gut instinct that tells them this is wrong, and they obviously should have followed that, or they should have done more research, or they should have sought more help. And some of them did, and their kids still found a way to do this. But I do think that these parents deserve empathy because this is uncharted waters. This is crazy times that we live in. And never before have we had such a manipulative, scary attempt to take children away from family.

in this way. And so when these parents are going to seek help for medical professionals and they're lied to like this, I think they do deserve our empathy because they don't want their kids to suffer and they didn't deserve to be lied to like this as well. The book is D-Trans True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. Again, it is available right now for pre-order and officially out on May 28th. And if you want to follow all of of Mary Margaret's work. You can first follow her on X at Mary Marg Olahan. Again, that's Mary Mark Ollahan on X.

And of course, follow all of her reporting at the DailySiddle website. That's DailySignal.com. Mary Margaret, thank you so much for being with us today. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so much for having me. This is so fun. Well, with that, that's gonna do it for today's episode.

Thank you so much for being with us here on the Daily Signal podcast. If you have not had a chance, make sure that you hook out our evening show, our top news show, where we bring you at the top news of the day. These are the headlines that you don't want to miss so that you can stay informed in what's happening in our world. And be sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new shows and leave the Daily Signal podcast a

five-star rating and review. Thanks again for being with us today. Make sure to pick up a copy of Mary Margaret Ollahan's book, D-Trans, True Stories of Escaping, the Gender Ideology Cult, and we will see you right back here at 5 p.m. for top news. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kate Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Mary Margaret O'Lehann, and Tyler O'Neill. Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geiney, and John Pop. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.