The Daily Signal - Transgender Movement Seduces Teenage Girls

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

A disturbing new trend has emerged among teenage girls. Abigail Shrier, author of “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” says some groups of young female friends are making the decision together that they're transgender.  The teenage girls begin taking hormones and some receive physically altering surgeries, often before they're legally allowed to drive or vote. Shrier joins “Problematic Women” to discuss her new book and why the transgender movement is “seducing our daughters.”  We also cover these stories: The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that they are sending additional federal officers to Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee.  President Trump said on Wednesday that he is going to 'bring fairness to big tech” by way of executive orders.  The U.S. is pulling almost 12,000 troops out of Germany.  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 Thursday, July 30th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Virginia Allen. There is a new transgender craze affecting teen girls. Lauren Evans and I recently spoke with Abigail Shrier on the Daily Signal's problematic women podcast about her new book, Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Cray's seducing Our Daughters. Shrier explains a disturbing trend among female teen friend groups. who decide together that they are men and begin taking hormone pills and even make the medical transition. It is a profound conversation, and we're excited to share it with you all on this show

today. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. Some federal law enforcement are leaving Portland. Oregon Governor Kate Brown said in a statement per the Hill. These federal officers have acted as an occupying force, refused accountability, and brought violence and strife to our community. She added, our local Oregon state police officers will be downtown to protect Oregonians' right to free speech and keep the peace. Let's center the Black Lives Matter movement's demands for racial justice and police accountability. It's time for bold action to reform police practices. The Department of Homeland Security is

expected to keep some officers in the area, Brown said. The Department of Justice announced Wednesday that they are sending additional federal officers to Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The action is a part of the DOJ's Operation Legend, which was launched July 8th, 1st in Kansas City, and is focused on stopping violent crime in parts of the country currently experiencing a spike in criminal activity. Attorney General William Barr said in a statement, that today we have extended Operation Legend to Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee, three cities that have seen disturbing increases in violent crime, particularly homicides.

For decades, the Department of Justice has achieved significant success when utilizing our anti-violent crime task forces and federal law enforcement agents to enforce federal law and assist American cities that are experiencing upticks in violent crime. The federal agents and investigators will work alongside local law enforcement to get shooters and other violent criminals off the streets. President Trump said on Wednesday that he is going to bring fairness to big tech by way of executive orders. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, if Congress doesn't bring fairness to big tech, which they should

have done years ago, I will do it myself with executive orders. In Washington, it has been all talk and no action for years. and the people of our country are sick and tired of it. CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google participated in a hearing on Wednesday to discuss whether the companies have misused their power in the online marketplace. Here's a clip from remarks Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio gave at the hearing. I'll just cut to the chase. Big tech's out to get conservatives. That's not a suspicion. That's not a hunch. That's a fact.

July 20th, 2020, Google removes the home pages of Breitbart and the daily caller. Just last night we learned Google has censored bright parts so much traffic has declined 99%. June 16th, 2020, Google threatens to demonetize and ban the federalists. April 19th, 2020, Google and YouTube announced a policy censoring the content that conflicts with recommendations of the World Health Organization. Now think about that. The World Health Organization, the organization that lied to us, the organization that's shield for China. And if you contradict something they say, they can say whatever they want. They can lie for China.

They can chill for China. You say something against them, you get censored. The U.S. is pulling almost 12,000 troops out of Germany. Defense Secretary Mark Esper made the announcement to the press on Wednesday, explaining where the troops will be restationed per Bloomberg quicktakes. The current UConn plan will reposition approximately 11,900 military personnel from Germany, from roughly 36,000 down to 24,000. in a manner that will strengthen NATO, enhance the deterrence of Russia, and meet the other principles I set forth.

Of the 11,900, nearly 5,600 service members will be repositioned within NATO countries, and approximately 6,400 will return to the United States, though many of these or similar units will begin conducting rotational deployments back to Europe. Esper said the move will cost several billion dollars over the course of time. The action is being taken, at least in part, because Germany has failed to stay on track with NATO's defense spending agreement. In 2014, all NATO countries agreed that they would be spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense spending by the year 2024. But Germany is not on track to meet that deadline. After Esper's announcement, Trump told the press that

American soldiers are, quote, there to protect Europe. They're there to protect Germany, right, and Germany is supposed to pay for it. Germany's not paying for it. We don't want to be the suckers anymore. So we're reducing the force because they're not paying their bills. It's very simple. They're delinquent. Now stay tuned for my and Lauren Evans' conversation with Abigail Schreier

about her new book, Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Crays, Seducing Our Daughters. Now we do discuss sensitive content and topics that may not be appropriate for children, so you might want to finish this podcast at a later time if you are currently with little children. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear some of the biggest names in American politics speak? Every day, the Heritage Foundation hosts webinars called Heritage Events Live. Webinar topics range from ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic to the CARES Act and the economy. These webinars are free and open to the public.

To find the latest webinars and register, visit heritage.org slash events. The word transgender was pretty uncommon in mainstream media and society only 10 years ago. Today, we regularly hear about someone who came out as transgender or who has begun transitioning to be a male or a female. The rapid growth in those who identify as transgender almost feels more like a social trend. We talk on this podcast a lot about this issue because it affects more than simply just those who choose to transition. We know the impact biological males who identify as transgender can have on women's sports. And we know that for parents, siblings, and friends, it can be extremely challenging to watch someone you love mutate their body because they don't feel comfortable in their own skin. This is a really complex issue and a very sensitive one.

Abigail Schreier has become an expert on the transgender issue in recent years. She's interviewed parents of children who chose to transition, transgender youth and adults, the doctors who perform the surgeries, and those who refuse to do so. Even individuals who have detransitioned. Schreier's research and findings are all composed in her new book, Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters. Abigail, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on.

It's great to be here. So I want to start out and acknowledge you are not a conservative activist or any part of any right of center think tank. You are a journalist. That's right. I think that's, I appreciate you asking that because I really, you know, I really wrote this as an open investigation. I didn't have a dog in this race when I, you know, when I set out to do this project. I really just wanted to explore what was happening to teenage girls. So can you tell our listeners how you.

got involved in this, you know, really hot button issue. Sure. So I wasn't actually interested in taking this on per se. A reader wrote to me. I write most often for the Wall Street Journal and I had written a piece about the pronoun laws that we have in California and New York that assign criminal and civil penalties for anyone who misgenders another person who uses the wrong pronouns or not their preferred pronouns. And I pointed out that this is straightforward. unconstitutional in America. In America, you can't make people say anything. Not someone's preferred pronoun, not anything at all. Or the government can't, rather. The government can't make people say things. And a reader wrote to me and she said, I've reached out to every mainstream

journalist I can find. I can't get anyone to take this on. But my daughter got caught up in a craze. My daughter at 19 went out, had gone off to college with a group of friends, decided she was out of nowhere. She had had a lot of mental health problems, anxiety and depression and whatnot, and decided she was transgender and had gone on a course of testosterone. And in fact, there were parents all across the country. And in fact, it turned out all across the West dealing with this very same thing. And this woman who wrote to me, she was an attorney, she was correct. I couldn't get another journalist to take it on. I tried to pass it off to a real investigative journalist, which I wasn't. And when I couldn't get anyone else to take it on, I got back in touch with her.

And I said, all right, tell me what you know. And it sort of went from there. Wow. So you make the argument in your book, Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze, seducing our daughters, that the transgender movement is almost like a fad among young people and specifically teen girls, that these young ladies are going through a lot. And if they feel like maybe they don't fit in or they're struggling with anxiety and depression, it can be easy to think maybe I'm feeling so awkward and depressed because I'm,

I'm actually supposed to be a man. And, you know, they share kind of this revelation with their friends, and their friends think, yes, that maybe is the case for me as well. And so they all decide together, hey, we're transgender. Can you just explain this a little bit further and why you think many of these young girls don't just stop it saying, I'm transgender, but they actually begin taking hormones and even undergo transition surgeries. Right.

So my book jumps off from the work of public. health researcher Lisa Littman at Brown University who found that all of a sudden, adolescent girls, a demographic that had never experienced gender dysphoria, the severe discomfort in one's biological sense, had sex, had never experienced this in any real numbers, all of a sudden had become the predominant demographic. Not only were teenage girls suddenly dominating the phenomenon, but these were girls with no childhood history. Typically, gender dysphoria began in early childhood. So she noticed that this was a giant epidemic and it was peculiar. It didn't look like typical gender dysphoria. And the reason it didn't, it was because not only was it afflicting the very

population that it had never afflicted before and the very population that typically experienced hysterias and spread them, but that these girls were doing this inspired by social media and with their friends. They were coming out in very short periods of time in friend groups. And there was just no reason you would see a 70 times the expected prevalence rate within clusters of friends. This was really strange. And it turned out, she was on to something. This is a phenomenon we've seen all across the West now. Adolescent girls claiming to have gender dysphoria spiked over 4,000 percent in Britain.

Numbers are extremely high in America as well and Canada and so forth across the West. And the problem, of course, is trans is a, you know, to get back to your question, is a chosen identity. So at some point you say, I'm really a boy. And then the pressure begins, well, prove it, right? Because you don't look like a boy. So at that point, that's when the pressure to start wearing a binder and then eventually move on to testosterone comes into play. Yeah, I love what I don't love. But I'm so happy that this has a name of rapid onset gender dysphoria because it really allows us to address the problem.

Right. That was the name Lisa Lippman gave it. because the thing to know is that it's totally atypical. This is not what gender dysphoria looks like. Gender dysphoria, we have a hundred year diagnostic history. It begins in early childhood typically, ages two to four. Little boys saying, no, mommy, I'm not a boy. I'm a girl. Call me a girl's name.

I only want to play with girls. I am a girl, that sort of thing. And there are certain diagnostic symptoms of gender dysphoria like those, okay? Very overt behaviors of insisting you're not a boy and that sort of thing. And in overwhelming cases, it dissipated, you know, as a boy got older. And most often, the boys became gay men. And in some cases, they became straight men. And in a very small number of cases, you know, they stayed as what we used to call transsexuals.

You're talking about 0.01% of the population. So 1 in 10,000 people, which probably means no one you know. Or, you know, certainly no one you went to high school with. Now we have 2% of high school students claiming to be trans. So that's 1.1 million American kids are high school students. And from the people I interview, I expect that number to be much, much higher, you know, since 2018 when that was taken. Because when I get calls from parents, they're telling me 15, 20% of their daughter's seventh grade class is claiming to be transgender. So what role do the schools play in this?

I mean, are students learning about gender identity in their classes at school? Is this only happening in sex ed classes? This is very pervasive. The thing to know is that gender ideology is taught in schools. It's extremely pervasive. It's mandatory throughout the California public school system. And it's taught in many public school systems. But not only that, it's been brought in a voluntary basis by many teachers who have taken it upon themselves to teach this.

And what does that mean? Does that turn a kid into a trans kid? No, of course not. What it does is it puts the idea in the child's head. A drumbeat begins in kindergarten. Your sex was assigned at birth by a doctor, but you only know who you really are. This is told to the kids from kindergarten on. And then what happens to these girls is these teenage girls, highly progressive, middle class double middle class girls. They tend to be white girls overwhelmingly. And they go through distress, they don't fit in. They're uncomfortable. And when they, you know, during puberty especially, they have high rates of anxiety and depression and they hit puberty and they're uncomfortable in their bodies. And that's when the drumbeat that's been talked to them since kindergarten sort of readily leaps to mind. And they think, well, I certainly don't feel great as a girl. Maybe I'm really a boy. And how does social media exacerbate this problem? The number of trans influence, online are legion and they are very charismatic and they're really enjoyable to watch their videos tee up automatically and I would say they are like the worst influence in every high school

times a thousand right because they they tend to have a lot of advice they tell you going on tea will solve all your problems they seem very cool their videos are intoxicating you don't even have to go looking for them to find them very often kids will come across them on art sharing websites or other seemingly innocuous websites. And they're a little older, right? They're kids in their 20s, making the videos. And they really promise that if you just, you know, sort of accept that you're really a boy, if you just, you know, start a course of testosterone, all your troubles will disappear. So what, I guess, it's a wild argument that is being put forth here. So you use that phrase that going on T. Explain that. And then, you, you know, you. You know,

you know, is there some legitimacy to you actually do feel better as a woman if you start taking testosterone? Like, how does that physically affect your body? Right. So the thing to know is that, first of all, these girls who are prey to this hysteria, and it's, you know, it's girls who are already lonely. Now, I say that, but they aren't uniquely lonely in a certain sense. And that is, this is the loneliest generation on record. They spend far less time with their peers. than previous generations and far more time online. So they don't talk to their girlfriends about their discomfort with their periods,

with their bodies, whatever. What they do is they take their troubles online where this group of influencers can't wait to promise them, you know, all kinds of things, including going on tea will solve your problems. And the truth of it is, the sort of insidious thing about testosterone, is it has certain good effects, okay?

Now these girls are getting it at 10 to 40 times what their bodies would normally handle, And it does a few things. One, it delivers euphoria. So the girls feel great. And they think, oh, my gosh, I was right. I really was supposed to be a man. It seems to confirm that.

Two, it suppresses anxiety. And remember, anxiety is one of these girls' biggest problems. So it gets their anxiety under control. They get a euphoria and they're socially bolder and braver than they've ever been. And it redistributes fat. It really does seem to be a cure for female puberty. of course there are lots of negative side effects. It comes with enormous cardiac risk, you know, several times the rate of heart attack because testosterone thickens the blood.

It leads to, in addition to a permanent, you know, hair, body and facial hair can alter facial features, lower the voice. It alters private anatomy. It leads to clitoral enlargement, which does not seem to go away. And then the biggest one, you know, that we're aware of is infertility. It can raise the risk of endometrial cancer significantly, which is why doctors will recommend a prophylactic hysterectomy if you've been on it for five years. Wow. Those are some major changes to the body. And I wanted to get into kind of what safeguards are in place or not in place. And what is the process of a young girl decides that she's transitioning? How does she go from that step to, you know, the hormones and then even eventually

the surgery. If you talk to transgender adults, as I have of previous generations, they will often tell you that there was a process that they went through to begin their medical transitions. The thing to know today is that it is easier to get testosterone for a teenage girl very often than even to get her ears pierce. The age of medical consent varies by state. In Oregon, it is 15. In Washington State, you're entitled to mental health care without parental permission at 13. So the age at which you can give informed consent varies by state. And then there are clinics all across the country, including places like Planned Parenthood, that give out testosterone on a first visit without even a therapist note. So you basically,

you go in, you sign a waiver, you insist you have gender dysphoria, and you walk out that day with a course of testosterone, which is a Schedule 3 controlled substance. Wow. So Planned Parenthood is really kind of the leading provider of a lot of these drugs. Is that what you're saying? It's certainly a leading provider. I don't know if it is the leading provider. But, yeah, it is a major provider of testosterone. And it's very easy to obtain.

Now, what about from a therapist perspective? You know, how do conversion therapy laws affect what a therapist can and can't say to a teenager who comes to them and says, hey, I think I am maybe a man or maybe a woman. You know, what laws restrict what they can and cannot say? So conversion therapy bans, which we now have, and I think 19 states last time I checked, really were a Trojan horse because they sort of purported to ban, you know,

so-called gay therapy, gay conversion therapy, which, of course, brought to mind the really grisly practices, electroshock therapy and whatnot used in prior eras. So they purported to ban those things. But they actually included gender identity language as well as, you know, being broad bans on all conversion therapy. They included gender identity language, which meant for the first time, therapists could not allow a child to get more, you couldn't contradict a person who came to you and said they had gender dysphoria and that their problem was they were in the wrong body. It made therapists extremely nervous to do that because if they didn't go along with it, they might be, have been accused of converting someone out of their gender identity.

So they no longer were free to make, to even, they no longer feel free even to suggest, wait a second, you have a lot of other mental health issues. Why don't we deal with those first? They don't even feel free to say that. Wow, that's wild. It's really, it's not allowing a therapist, essentially. to do what they've been trained to do. But you talked with a lot of teen girls when you are writing this book. Young ladies who either had transition or were moving towards that step.

What were their stories? What did they tell you about how they were doing now, that they were taking hormones or maybe had had a mastectomy or other surgeries? Yeah, tell us a little bit about what they had to say. You know, if these girls had gone off and were flourishing as, you know, identified boys, I wouldn't have written the book. If these girls weren't cutting off their families, experiencing massive depression, you know, not dropping out of college, not getting jobs, I wouldn't have written the book. I sort of would have said, okay, they made this life choice. That's up to them. But instead, it was a picture of girls in terrible anguish whose solution they're running to, you know,

surgeries and hormones had not made them feel better at all. And they certainly weren't thriving. And I'll give you one example of a young woman, Desmond, who told me the moment that she identified as transgender in high school, she got so much celebration not only from the school therapist and from the school, but from every doctor she talked to. Everyone, you know, insisted she was right and she was brave and so forth. And she went on testosterone and the testosterone, which is delivered in extremely large doses to women, 10 to 45 times with their bodies would normally handle, caused uterine cramping, which it can do. It causes vaginal atrophy and uterine atrophy. And the uterine cramping was so severe, it necessitated a hysterectomy.

And only when she woke up, and I think she was 21 at the time when she woke up with a hysterectomy in the hospital. all of a sudden she didn't have any cheerleaders around her anymore. And for the first time, she realized this has been a horrible mistake. And no one was really there to guide her anymore. Yeah. I mean, it seems like all young teenage women want is attention and to feel part of something. But I wanted to get a little bit deeper into what de-transitioning looks like.

Is it as simple as stopping taking the testosterone? or, you know, do you need to get another surgery to change back? Oh, so it depends. It depends what you've done. But the alterations, of course, many of them are permanent. And it depends. So you can't change some of these things back. And some of them can.

You know, everybody's body is a little bit different. If you remove breasts, that's it. The game over. You can't get those functions back. You can't ever breastfeed and you can't ever, probably ever get any kind of erotic sensation that you once had. You know, breasts, they, you know, I talked to surgeons and I learned that breasts are actually far more complicated organs than people think. It really isn't just the, you know, appearance of a breast,

but there's a complicated structure there, and it's all that functionality is destroyed. But as for testosterone, some of the effects of testosterone will go away and some won't. So, you know, the body and facial hair is there to stay. The, you know, it'll change your voice. It'll change your, it may permanently have altered your features a little bit. You know, it really depends on the body, you know, on the individual and their, you know, particular makeup. So what are the emotional effects of a woman who starts taking those pills and then, and decides, okay, this isn't the road I want to keep going down, but they have, they've caused

that permanent damage to their body. You know, the detransitioners are a group of very brave, you know, men and women who've come to, you know, they certainly have a lot of clarity, and I always enjoy talking to them. But yes, of course, they're, because they regret what happened, they, you know, there's certainly a risk of, you know, they're dealing with a lot of, you know, they're dealing with a lot of unhappiness. All the things that were covered and so easy to obtain to transition are no longer free. So if you want to go back, none of that's paid for all of a sudden. And no one's cheering you on for the first time.

And in fact, you're considered a basically, you know, a turncoat by the community that encouraged you to transition in the first place. you will no longer be welcome in any of your former, you know, trans circles. It's not an easy life necessarily. And these people are harassed terribly by trans activists who want to insist they don't exist or that they were never really trans to begin with. They have to be very brave. One of the main arguments for going ahead and, you know, taking the testosterone or having the surgery is that if a woman doesn't, feel like who she really is inside, she's going to commit suicide. But it actually, the numbers show that the opposite is true. What is the suicide rate for, you know, people who do go ahead and

have the surgery or take the testosterone? So I don't know that we have good numbers on that. First of all, a couple of things. It depends what you mean. There are long-term studies, obviously, of male to female transsexuals, but this is a fairly new population of these girls who suddenly decide their transgender. We've never seen numbers like this before between 2016 and 2017, the number of biological females getting gender surgeries in the United States quadrupled. So we're seeing an explosion. So for the first time, we're seeing real regret. Look, the rates of suicide are high. I don't want to under my, you know, I don't want to suggest that, this isn't a population that we should be worried about. We should. And the problem is, of course,

that we have no proof that they insist, you know, the activists insist, oh, if you don't transition, you'll kill yourself, but here are two problems. One, we have no proof that the gender dysphoria is what's causing the suicidality. We know that these are girls with a lot of other mental health issues. And two, we have absolutely no proof that affirmation and transition, medical transition, relieves the suicidality. So given that, the suicide narrative is really false. It's not something that should be used to coerce people and to making irreversible decisions.

So those numbers that you mentioned, that increase is really shocking to see that it has risen that quickly in recent years of specifically these teen girls coming out as transgender. I mean, I guess, you know, those who are trans advocates would say, well, they've probably, you know, there's always been tons and tons of young women who have been transgender. They just didn't feel comfortable until now. What's your response to that? Right. So I don't think that's right.

There are three reasons. One, Lisa Lipman pointed out that the prevalence rate within friend groups was 70 times what you would expect. So what that means was, and not only. that, but these girls were coming out with their friends within a very short period of time. So this wasn't the case of, you might say, oh, well, maybe there was just, you know, these are the, this is the normal rate of, we're returning to a normal base rate of transgender, you know, biological females. Okay, but then there's, then you can't explain why it would cluster in friend groups and why those friend, why those friend groups would turn transgender together

within a very short period of time. It wasn't like there were extant transgender kids in the population, they found each other in high school, but rather with a whole friend group would become transgender within a very short period of time. So that's one reason. The other two reasons, of course, are number one, and this is just my own reason, but number one, I think following that logic, if the idea is we're just returning to a normal base rate now that there's greater societal acceptance, we should be seeing women in their 40s and 60s coming out as transgender. After all, now is their moment. Now is the time when they have the most acceptance they've ever had in their lives. But of course, we're not seeing that. We're only seeing a giant spike in the same population

that communicates and spreads and exacerbates, you know, things, other hysterias like anorexia, cutting, bulimia, this sort of thing. And the third reason, I don't think that's right. I don't think it's right that there's this, you know, we're returning to a natural base right now that there's greater societal acceptance is because on the activist theory, you know, it was the lack of societal acceptance and lack of ability to be who they really are that's driving the suicide rate. But of course, then the suicide rate among this population of girls should be going down. But instead, we've seen it rise very, very sharply this decade, right? We know that we're seeing rates of suicide and depression in teens and even tween girls that really

should shock everyone. We've never seen numbers like this. So it is really the opposite of what you would expect if this were some sort of natural phenomenon. So how does the parents play into this? Do most of the parents that you talk to, are they cheerleaders for a while for this? You know, are they automatically want to stop it? You know, what is their relationship with this process? So the parents I interview are overwhelmingly politically progressive, which I think has to do with a lot of things. but one reason is, of course, their kids are in the schools that have a lot of gender ideology in them. And they're overwhelmingly politically progressive. And what happens is the girl comes out at 11 or 12 or 13 and says she is gay or she's pansexual,

or she's asexual. She makes this announcement. And these parents who are very concerned, very loving and very devoted parents, and they love their daughters very much. And their daughter's a very precocious young girl who also has. anxiety and depression very often. They want to make her feel good and they say, okay, honey, you're gay. That's great. Let's go to the pride parade or we want to support you in this.

And in many cases within a year or so, the girl then kicks it up a notch and she says, actually, mom, I'm really a boy. And a lot of the parents tell me this because they say, you know, I supported LGBTQ rights my whole life, but I wish I hadn't sort of so completely. embraced this because I think my embrace of her announcement at 13 led her to rebel even more. And I think there's something to that, meaning that what the girl was asking for was an opportunity to individuate. But Gen X parents are so eager to co-opt and helicopter and be there for every one of their daughter's announcements from, I want a new ear piercing to anything else. They want to be right there with her and they want to do it too.

That sometimes when they don't let her have the rebellion, they don't recognize her a sexual identity announcement as a rebellion. And they co-op that. She then goes for something more. So then what is your advice to parents whose daughter does come to them and say, I think I'm a man? I mean, are there resources out there that parents can turn to? Yeah, they're great resources. Parents of RODD kids is a great one. There's also fourth wave now.

But I would say that, and there are good psychologists, so though they are harder to find because so many of them practice affirmative therapy. So so many of them will actually just work to ingrain this further in her mind. And, you know, anyway, parents have called me. Parents called me just a couple weeks ago. One parent called me to tell me that because of quarantine, she overheard her daughter's therapist. And the therapist had promised that she would never be an affirmative therapist.

She wasn't going along with this because, of course, they didn't think that was the daughter's real problem. And lo and behold, she was able to overhear the session and the therapist is using her male name and pronouns and, you know, and helping ingrain this. And that's something I've heard again and again. So what can parents do? Number one, depending on the age of the child, they really need to get their kid off social media. If they can possibly do it, if we're talking about a tween or young teen and you can bar social media, it's a really good idea to do. We know that it's linked to extraordinarily high rates of depression and anxiety. It's literally pushing a mental health crisis on our teen girls.

We really should. They shouldn't be on it. But a few other things. Number one, they should oppose gender ideology in the schools. Parents have no idea how radical it is, how aggressively it's being pushed, and it's really confusing an entire generation. And we're seeing that. We are seeing rates of LGBTQ.

I mean, you know, just this year, I think in 2020, I think it was even 2020. There was a news report that at every degree in state college, half the student body was identifying as LGBTQ. So we know these rates don't make any sense. They really aren't organic or natural in the population. So, you know, pushing a new gender ideology, pushing the idea that these kids need to experiment with a new ideology and a new orientation and new gender is really producing a lot of these kids. identify as trans. We need to get that out of the schools. And then another thing, and by the way, that doesn't mean we can't show compassion for transgender students in the school. Of course we should, but we should reject the notion that in order to show compassion, we have to indoctrinate an entire

student body. And the third thing I would say is it's really important to remind parents that they're the parents for a reason. Their daughters may hate them for a while when they, you know, put limits on her. But they don't have to go along with ever-pronelial. she comes up with and they don't have to think she's right about everything she says about herself, even claims about sexual orientation or sexual identity. She may just be 11 or 12 or 13. So anyway, those are three quick ones. So this isn't, transgender isn't a new phenomenon. Why is this moment unique in the medical history of transgenderism? You mean, why are so many people coming out with atypical gender dysphoria claiming to be trans today?

Why today? Well, a few reasons. You know, girls, we've always had this population of girls in severe distress, okay, in a psychological pain. They've never experienced pain in the numbers they have today, but there's always been these girls in pain who look to the culture for an explanation. And in prior decades, they said, oh, I'm so fat. If I just threw up more or if I just stopped eating, I will, I'll be happier. And they, in that way where they really increased and spread their own anorexia and bulimia through their friend groups.

So today they're doing it with this transgender identity. They're doing it with, oh, if only if I were a boy, my troubles would go away. The thing is today, for one thing, we're seeing girls in greater psychological pain than we've ever seen. Teens and tweens, largely fueled by social media and feelings of inadequacy. produces are more unhappy and in psychological pain than we've ever seen before. These are really fragile kids. They've been really helicoptered. And they are, you know, things that would be humdrum to prior generations are absolute crises for these girls, like getting dumped, like not fitting in with a group of friends, like losing a grandparent when you're in middle

school. These are unpleasant things, but there are things that other generations were able to taken stride and for these girls are absolute crises. So that's part of it. And I think one part is that they've noticed that girls and women have really fallen in esteem in the broader culture. They see the men. They know men can waltz right into their bathrooms and shower rooms now claiming to be girls. They know they aren't being protected and they know very few even women are standing up for them. Wow. All right. Well, you can find irreversible damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your local bookstore. It's also available on Kindle and through the Audible app. Abigail, thank you so much for your time today. We just

really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much, too. I just want to highlight your compassion. You know, it's such a difficult issue, and you're so compassionate to both sides. It's just been really a pleasure talking with you. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. And that will do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. Please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify. And please leave us a review or rating on Apple Podcasts and give us your feedback. Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow.

The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, visit Daily Signal. com.