The Eric Metaxas Show - Abigail Shrier

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Abigail Shrier covers the very serious problem of young girls choosing to change their sex, and highlights facts and interviews from her book, "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters."

show. I shouldn't tell you this, but Eric hired someone who sounds just like him to host today's show. But since I'm the announcer, they told me. So I am telling you, don't be fooled. The real Eric's in jail. And welcome. Hey there, folks. Today is what, Thursday? Thursday. Thursday. It's Thursday. Chris, is it Thursday? You know what that means. It means that this is our last opportunity to talk to this audience about July 4th, about this weekend, because tomorrow, this program is going to be. It's going to be given over to Pastor Robert Jeffress and his special guest, Vice President, I believe it's pronounced Pence.

That's tomorrow. Friday on this program, both hours. There's a special service. Robert Jeffers is having it at his church in Dallas. Vice President Pence will be his guest. There's going to be music, all kinds of fun stuff. That's tomorrow. Today, just if we're tracking correctly, we have two special guests.

today. Coming up, well, depending on what hour you're listening to, an hour one today, we have my friend John Rankin, the Reverend John Rankin, going to be talking about the loss of his son. Really important that we have him back to talk about that, and we'll have him back again next week and talk about his run for Congress. And in hour two today, I'm talking to Abigail Trier about the transgender situation. She wrote a book I think I have it here. It's called Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Cray's Seducing Our Daughters. So today, John Rankin,

Abigail, Trier. Right. And it might be the other way. It might be the other way around, too. We might surprise you and put Abigail first and Dave. Yeah, you have no idea who's coming up next, do you? Do we? No, we have no idea. Hey, guys, the July 4th weekend is a us and I just want to say that I think it's really important that we use this time not only to work on our tans oh yes perhaps that's the most important point of the weekend but there are other things that we need to do we need to think about what is American liberty what is American freedom I hope we will really celebrate that and not potty

dogs and fireworks. Fireworks and hot dogs are used to celebrate American independence, American liberty. That's what we use hot dogs and fireworks for. It's not a weekend about fireworks and hot dogs. Well, there's going to be a lot of people coming back from the beach with a tan line that goes like around their face. Oh, right, a COVID kind of masky kind of tan. COVID tan line.

Did I tell you guys about the woman who cursed me out? for not wearing a mask as I was, as I was running up Madison Avenue the other day? No. I'm not kidding. You can't run, you know, like I don't jog gingerly. I actually run. And so you need to, you need a lot of oxygen. So you can't wear a mask when you're running, right?

So I was running down Madison Avenue and a woman cursed me like, where's your blanking mask? It was really mean, nasty, whatever. And what she didn't reckon on was that my parents, they didn't raise me to put up with that kind of junk. So I stopped in my tracks. I picked up a garbage, no, just kidding. I stopped in my tracks and I confronted this woman. And I'd like to think that she would think twice the next time she curses at somebody on the street whom she doesn't know. it's an interesting thing.

Americans are so polite, we just kind of think, oh, sorry, I'm not wearing a mask. Well, you can't wear a mask. You'll die of carbon dioxide poisoning if you wear a mask while you're exercising for 45 minutes. See, I thought she thought you were a superhero. And it's like, where's your Superman mask? What, aren't you? That's probably what she thought. Anyway, but it's just we're living in such strange times.

And, you know, I didn't mean it to go in this direction. but it sums up to me why we need to understand what liberty really is, right? Now, there's this idea that we're all, you know, we're all afraid of what the state is telling us we must do. And I think it's a free country. I wasn't near anyone. How dare this person say this to me? I mean, she's medically way off base. The idea that you could wear a mask, it would be really unhealthy to wear a mask when you're going for a long run and needing

oxygen with every breath. But the idea that certain parts of the country, that there's that kind of a bullying that goes on, right? I mean, I think cultural pressure is important, but it's interesting to me how, you know, I guess I remember years ago when I was traveling Europe and you'd see it from country to country. When you were in Italy, if you crossed against the light, like everybody, nobody's paying any attention to the traffic lights or whatever. If you do that in Germany, they look at you like, what? Like, you can't do that. If you do it in Switzerland, they will yell at you. Like, you know, it's, I've always thought of America as kind of a happy medium in a sense, right? Like, we believe in order and we believe in freedom. And it's

important to live that out in our lives. And I, I'd like to think that that by pushing back against the woman who thought she was doing her duty to curse at me, that she'll think twice next time, maybe be a little bit more careful about whom she dares curse at, you know, on the street. Well, I know, but depending, and we've mentioned this before, we've mentioned this before, but depending on how the election goes this year, next year at this time could be a very, very different Fourth of July celebration or not. Well, we now know, because the cultural Marxists have told us, we now know, of course, that the 4th of July

and American independence are racist. We now know that. And so we need to take a bold stand against it. Yeah, the racist have told us that it's racist, so they're experts apparently. Yeah. All right, Chris.

It's your turn. Do you have anything horrifying, beautiful to share with the group? It's an encounter group. What do you have to share? Well, no, I was just wondering, you know, if Paul Revere were alive today and he was running around on his horse, would he get clipped by a Buick or something? Like, you know, just the climate today, it seems so crazy.

Well, we now know that Paul Revere, of course, was a racist, and that we should have succumbed to the tyranny of King George. That would have been the right thing to do. And we now know that everything the founders did was racist. It's important that we finally have come to understand this. Wouldn't you guys agree? I would agree. and the fascists are telling us we're fascists.

So, you know, these are the experts, by the way. Nothing like a little sarcasm to start the weekend. I'm being truthful. I, yeah, absolutely. Listen, this is a good opportunity for us to remind our audience. We need your help, folks. Whatever I post on social media, if you like it, would you share it? We post almost all of our videos as soon as possible.

Would you share those on your social media? Would you share those things with your friends? We want to expand our platform. We actually need your help to do it. We get so many emails from wonderful people who say how much they appreciate what we do here. And I have to say that means a lot to me. I'm still able to read every single email that comes in. And it really means more than you could ever know.

But I will ask you, please use your voice. Please share what we are able to share. here on this program and on social media. And actually, please tell your friends to subscribe to our newsletter. Go to ericmataxis.com. It's one way that we have to get things out beyond the regular social media that we post on Twitter and parlor and Gab and Facebook and Instagram, whatever else. And I guess I don't want to forget before we go to.

to our guests today to remind you as well that we need you to support our sponsors. Mike Lindell and MyPillow, number one sponsor on this program. If you or anyone you know goes to MyPillow.com, use the code Eric. You'll get our very generous discount. I don't think anybody advertising on TV or whatever, you know, Mike Lindell, those codes are, are better than ours. I think that ours is as good as it gets. So if you put in Eric, we would appreciate that.

And I also want to remind you before we go to the break that Unabound Coffee, honorbound coffee.com, also a major sponsor on this program, the folks behind relief factor, which I take every single day because it works, they are behind Unabound Coffee. Underbound Coffee.com, 100% of their profits, go to help military families.

What could be more patriotic than ordering honorbound coffee, com. We'll be right back with some fun programming just for you. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Metaxas show. As promised, Abigail Shrier is my guest. She's written an important book, folks. It is called Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Cray's Seducing Our Daughters. Abigail, welcome to this program. Thanks so much for having me on. This is really important. The book is brand new.

It's called Irreversible Damage. I know that you're a writer, frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. This is, it strikes me, one of these central issues of our time, the madness that has overtaken our culture with regard to this issue. So where are you coming from and how did you find your way to writing about this issue? So this was not an issue that I sought out. I had written a piece for the Wall Street Journal on transgender pronoun laws. We have laws in two states now, New York and California, that actually assign criminal penalties for misgendering someone,

using something other than their preferred gender pronouns. And this is just straightforwardly unconstitutional. In America, the government cannot compel people to say anything. And so that's what I wrote in the Wall Street Journal. It's actually constitutionally fairly uncontroversial. We've long known that you can't make people say things in America or the government can't make people say things. And I've read this and wrote to me and said, would you be willing to take this on? My daughter, you know, has been caught up in this sudden trans identification.

All kinds of girls are all across our country. And in fact, it turns out across the West. And she asked me to look into it. And I said, I wrote her back. I said, I'm an opinion journalist, not an investigative journalist. So I found someone else for her. And I waited. And I waited for many months.

no article came. And that's when I decided to give it another look and take it up. Well, look, most people who are half paying attention know that this is a kind of madness. It's part of a larger madness that seems to have been attacking the West over some time, I would say, but it seems to have come to a head in a number of ways. One of them is this idea that our genders are somehow fluid or whatever. I mean, maybe let's start here. Where did what most people, whether they're willing to say it or aren't,

what most people know to be a crazy idea, where did this come from? Even though, you know, people like me understand that it doesn't seem to have any basis in reality, but how has it been thrust upon us so quickly and so overwhelmingly? That's not clear to me. So a couple ways. So the transgender activists, by which I do not mean transgender people who are, you know, lovely. I've interviewed many of them for my book. But the activists who are the most extreme members of any group have been very, very successful at pushing a gender ideology.

Both in the universities have taught this for years in very, in very, courses and into the schools. One of the problems is that there, and I learned this when I did my investigation into the public school system in California, there's no difference between activists and teachers in the California school system so that the activists come in and are teaching teachers. They're instructing them. They're providing curricula for gender ideology and sexual orientation instruction. they're doing this under the guise of anti-bullying,

and they have enabled a full-scale curriculum, kindergarten all the way through 12th in California. And then the activists have been very aggressive in the Medical Association. So the professional associations now all have adopted affirmative care as the standard, meaning that when a transgender-identified person comes to them and says, self-diagnosis with gender dysphoria, the role of the mental health professional and even the physician is to agree with the patient's self-diagnosis. There's no other area of medicine that requires this.

Well, look, we used to say that homosexual attraction was a psychiatric problem. It seems to me that the psychiatric establishment hasn't been willing to do anything but fold to to pressure. In other words, you've got to be able to make a reasonable case for why what we would call gender dysphoria isn't a kind of madness, that it isn't a kind of a problem, suddenly to fold and to say, you know what, we got it all wrong, sorry, and how can we help you? I mean, I don't understand. I'm coming from a biblical perspective, right? I believe that, you know, what the West has taught and what the Judeo-Christian scriptures have represented for now millennia is true.

And I think most people around the world would say something similar. How does it happen that educated people in the West on a dime turn around and say, that's all wrong? And we now have information evidently to support the idea that everybody got it wrong forever until this minute. Well, let me push back on you a little bit about something, and that is that I've interviewed a lot of transgender adults for my book, and I have to say that very many of them are leading good, productive lives in which being transgender does not seem an impediment to a full

and healthy life. Excuse me, let me just be clear in what I said. I didn't mean to suggest anything different from what you just said. I'm talking about the larger perspective. How is that changed? I understand. But then you have this activist population, right? So you have an activist population, which is, you know, by definition, very extreme.

Some of whom I don't even know if what they're suffering from is exactly gender dysphoria, right? You have a very aggressive population of people trying to push into women's bathrooms, trying to make women uncomfortable. These are not at all like the, you know, so many of the rational and normal and healthy transgender adults I've interviewed. And in fact, they're very alienated by these people. Very often transgender adults just want to pass in society. And they're also not like the young girls. These teenage girls, we have a 100-year history, diagnostic history of gender dysphoria now.

We know what it looks like. And what these teenage girls claim to have is not gender dysphoria. It doesn't match up with what we know about genderedifference. gender dysphoria. So it really is a contemporary hysteria through the schools of girls self-diagnosing with this. And unfortunately, we've put all these categories of people under the same, you know, in the same bag and surrounded them with civil rights and the idea that this is a brave new thing. But in actuality, I think it's several different phenomena going on at once. And with the young girls specifically, what they're suffering with does not seem to be gender dysphoria,

per se. Okay, that's, see, this is why it's so difficult, right? You've just said it. I mean, people try to make sense of this, and you're talking about several things at once. And I think that, you know, what I've seen here in Manhattan in New York, where I live, that it becomes a thing, right? In certain circles, it's, it's the thing that so-and-so in my class has decided, you know, that she's a boy, so-and-so. It's suddenly, it's in the drinking water, as it And that's what you talk about in your book, that suddenly now you have all these young women, I guess, responding to various social pressures. And you're saying that's genuinely different than somebody who really is sincerely struggling and trying to figure this out.

This is more of a trendy thing that has kind of captured the minds of young people. Well, I do think these girls are genuinely suffering. So I definitely would say these girls are in severe distress. But very often, as with, you know, hysterias of the past, you know, multiple personality disorder, even anorexia and bulimia, girls have been able to spread this, which doesn't mean they're not in distress. They're in serious distress. They have very high rates of anxiety and depression. They're in pain. But when they look to describe that pain, sometimes they look to things that are in the culture. And they've latched onto this even, and the reason we know, by the way, this isn't traditional gender dysphoria is these girls have no childhood history. Gender dysphoria has always begun in early childhood and it overwhelmingly afflicted males. So in the 100-year history of gender dysphoria, we've never seen it start in adolescence and be overwhelmingly female. And yet now they are the dominant demographic all over the West, girls. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females quadrupled in the United States.

So we know that this population that is never, this demographic, that has never before experienced gender dysphoria and has experienced something that really doesn't look like exactly like gender dysphoria, is experiencing it in the highest numbers. And it's the same demographic that falls prey to a lot of social contagions. I was going to say, that's right. In other words, it seems to me that, you know, when you hear about girls cutting themselves,

or you hear about a number of things along those lines. So there's real pain, but it finds a channel in this trend. Everybody's doing this or doing this, and now it's this, but the title of your book is Irreversible Damage. This, it's not something like bulimia or anorexia, which is reversible. It's a different kind of problem. We're going to be right back, folks.

I'm talking to Abigail Schreier. The book is Irreversible, Dam. The transgender craze seducing our daughters. We'll be right back. The Trump campaign has a special offer just for you. President Trump wants to meet you. This will be the first opportunity he's had to meet with American patriots like you since our country started reopening. His team will cover the flight and hotel and give you VIP access for yourself and a guest. He'll even take a picture with you. All you have to do is text VIP to 88022 today for your chance to meet President Trump.

Again, that's VIP to 88022 for your. your chance to win and join President Trump in the fight to keep America great for four more years. Hi, folks, trying times. Just know they won't last. Triumph times can be hard on our digestive track. So why not try LifeChange Tea at GetTheT.com? Life Change Tea is an herbal blend of tea that helps the digestive track and the colon cleanse from intruders. For years, people have experienced the benefits from Life Change Tea. And so can you. Log on to GetTheT.com. That's Give the Tee.com. That's GetsUrude. Get the T.com.

And for those of you that want to go a step further, we have non-GMO organic supplements. If you're listening to Eric, you're informed and educated. So how about free shipping? Just go to the checkout, find the coupon code. Enter Eric, E-R-I-C, hit Apply, and receive free shipping. Again, Eric, in the coupon code, hit apply free shipping. These historic times will pass. The yuck in your gut will pass also.

with get the tea.com. That's get the tea.com. Our love is alive and so we begin. Hey there, folks. I'm talking to the author of a brand new book. The author's Abigail Shrier. The book is irreversible damage, the transgender craze,

seducing our daughters. Abigail, you're just clarifying for us kind of some of what makes this so complicated to process. You do say it's a craze, and it's seducing our daughters. And so we were just talking about that.

How did it happen that this became a way that young women are dealing with, you know, the kind of pain that seems to come along with much of adolescence? So there are a couple of reasons this happened. First, these young girls are in severe distress. So this generation of girls, we know they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety and depression like we've never seen before. And we can, and several races. now have tied it very precisely to the introduction in 2007 of the iPhone and with social media.

We know that social media causes us to compare ourselves to other people and that causes everyone, you know, some measure of anxiety and feeling bad. And we know that adolescent girls suffer the most from this. So we know we've got this distress population. At the same time, we also have the thorough gendered ideology and indoctrination in the school. schools. So it's constantly being suggested to them that they might not be their gender. Okay. This is constantly presented as an option to them. We also see it that this transgender status has been raised in the culture, which some may say is a good thing, that they're no

longer treated as poorly by the society as they once were. But there's been a rise in status of transgender people at the same time you've seen a diminution in the status of girls and women. And you see that when you have, you know, biological boys out competing them on sports teams, taking their trophies, you know, you can, you see that in mediocre biological boys, I should say, mediocre athletes taking their trophies, men pushing their way into their locker rooms. It's no secret that the culture has really turned its back on girls. And so you add all that together to the fact that, you know, adolescence has always been a hard time for girls. Your body is changing. Your hormones are raging and it's it's by its very nature of a very vulnerable and difficult time

and now you're constantly telling them they could choose something else um and the last thing I should add by the way this is a time when victim status is something very sought after um by by our youth and this is the only victim status that that a young white girl can choose and so many of them do it seems to me you know that this is a failure of moral courage In other words, there are plenty people who know something's wrong, but they know that there's a cost to speaking up. They know that they will be on the outs if they come against some of the ideology that's being pushed. And, you know, when I hear you talk about this being pushed in schools, I think it's a very fair question to say, is it any business of government schools to be pushing this kind of ideology?

why are they doing this? I mean, this is no different to me than if they were teaching a particular religious faith in the schools. It's not their role to do that. That's something that ought to be done at home that parents have control over, but they really have pushed their way in. They have. And actually, my chapter on the schools is one of my favorite chapters because I was able to sort of go deep and really, I hope, on earth what was actually going on in California, which is a model for public schools across the country. You know, there really, I can only say that there was no difference between when I, when I looked at the people and the materials they were using, it turned out there was no

difference between the teachers and the activists. Very often the teachers were members of activist organizations. The Gay Straight Alliance Club, which is set up to be a haven for gay students, in fact was very often just an avenue. for pushing gender ideology. So I think that there was a lot of, I don't, you know, I don't know what to call it,

but bad faith in our school system, whereas rather than educating these children, they decided to remake them. Look, you've said it perfectly. I mean, that's exactly right. Even the idea that someone can remake kids or people is itself an ideology. You know,

it argues against that we have an innate nature, which itself is like a religious, you know, belief. And if you're pushing that on kids, you need to be called out on it and say that, you know, you can have those beliefs, but to push them on our kids is another thing. That's not the role of the schools. You said bad faith. I mean, that's being generous because I think it is the camel's nose in the tent, right? In other words, you say you're a victim, you say people are being discriminated against, and all good Americans say, well, we don't want that. Even if I disagree with this or that, nobody should be persecuted. And so we go along with it.

And then the next thing we know, they've gained a power base, and they're using it in ways that they never advertised. I mean, it seems to me that this is particularly true in public education. What do you think it is about teachers? teachers unions that that that makes them so amenable to this it's a strange development in our history it is a strange development and I think what you said is is the reason that it's hit progressive family is so hard um I I the vast majority of the parents I talk to and um are politically progressive and they didn't do anything wrong they were just when when when they were told that their their schools were introducing you know teaching about a transgender

child or teaching about gender options to their kids, they really thought, well, if this is what's necessary to prevent bullying, you know, then, you know, I certainly don't want anyone bullied. And if this, and if, you know, teaching kids about pride, you know, having a pride paraded school, they were more likely to think, well, that's a very nice thing. And unfortunately, these parents also got very abused because what seemed, you know, or was presented as an anti-bullying, measure was really about indoctrinating their children and sewing gender confusion in the students. Forgive me. We're going to go to a hard break. We'll be right back with Abigail Shry. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to the author of Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze,

seducing our daughters, Abigail Shrier. You were just saying, well, you were just saying something and I had to cut you off, so why don't I let you just continue? Oh, I was just saying that, you know, the majority of the parents I talk to are politically progressive who have suffered with this. And part of, they didn't do anything wrong. I think they approached the school system with good faith, and they believed, many of them believed that, and also the private school system, they very often had their kids in secular private school or in public school. And they believed that of teaching about gender ideology was, or teaching about different

sexualities and genders was necessary to prevent bullying. they were much more willing to go along with it. And I think they did that really from a place of compassion and real sincerity. And I think they were very abused by ideologues who took advantage and used it as an opportunity to indoctrinate their children in so gender confusion. I mean, that seems to me at the heart of the American problem, right? We're an extremely tolerant people. We're not, you know, we really want everybody. to get along and that we've always been that way but there's a downside to it right in other words that

that works until someone decides to take advantage of it and and and it seems to me that we see this over and over and over again that people understand that if they can play the victim trump card they they will have power and we've seen that over and over and over again that they're they're willing to to use our you know native cultural uh tendency toward tolerance to gain more power for themselves. And then I would say another part of the American problem that's endemic is that we don't really, we don't know exactly what we believe a lot of the time. We kind of go along, half-believing things.

And so we don't have the cultural confidence to stand up and to say, excuse me, no, that's wrong. We're paying our taxes so that you can teach our kids in local parentis. You do not have our permission to impose these ideologies on our kids. That's not what we're paying you for. It's not why we've ever had public schools. But people really have just been too busy to think about it and to push back. And so we sort of find ourselves here.

Right. So a lot of the parents, the thing to know about this is very often the distress and the identification that these girls announced is not really about gendered dysphoria at all. And one of the sort of interesting facets of this is that very often these girls would come to their progressive parents and say, at 13, having never kissed a boy or a girl had any romantic experience, because these girls tend to be very sheltered, very bright, very sheltered. They would say, I'm a lesbian. And the parents would react with total embrace. They would embrace the kids and say, oh, are you a lesbian? That's, that's great. You know, whatever you want to be, let me, you know, drive you to prom with your girlfriend and whatnot. And then very often the girl would dial, you know, take it up a notch.

say, oh yeah, well, now I'm trans. And it turned out what the girl sometimes was asking for was not recognition of her genuine sexual identity. What she was asking for was a rebellion. And when the parents were so sort of willing to go along with an announcement of a new sexual orientation, even from a child who was 12 years old and had had no experience, you know, romantic or otherwise, when the parents embraced it, it would turn out that the child would be pushing for more and more

because what they really wanted more than anything was individuation from the parents. So they land on, oh, yeah, mom, well, you know, I'm so different from you. I'm a boy. And then, yeah, and that's sort of where it breaks down. Well, there's so much here. It's interesting because you feel like the role of the parent is to push back, right? Not to go along, but to say, excuse me, go to. to your room. In other words, that in a funny way, that's what kids are craving. And so they push

and push and push until they meet that. And if they don't meet that, they keep going. And in a funny way, I would say also part of the, you know, from the 60s onward, we've denigrated, you know, ancient ideas of older people being wiser. And we basically said, you know, the youth are wiser. And so parents don't want to be perceived as parents. They want to be friends. And that leads to all kinds of problems because that's not your job. Your job is to be a parent, not a friend. Friendship is a great thing if you can get it, but first you have to be a parent.

So if you're unwilling to be unpopular with your own kids, you sort of help the spiral. At least that's how I'm processing what you're saying. That's right. So I'm, you know, I'm part of Gen X. I'm sort of the end of Gen X. And one of the things about Janax parents is that we really didn't want to be like our parents. We wanted to be more psychologically attuned and more open and embracing and really be friends in certain sense with our kids. And the problem with that is that when a 12 or 13 year old thinks that they are decides they're a lesbian.

And another thing is that we tend to micromanage, right? We're the helicopter generation of parents. So when a 12 or 13 year old girl who has never had any. romantic or sexual experience announces she's lesbian, very often parents in my generation thinks there's something for them to do. They have to go to social media and make a public announcement or, you know, take their daughter to pride parades. What I think is important to remember sometimes is that the kid is still just 12 or 13. And there's no need to do anything about that. It's not, it's not a project. Sometimes it's just a fleeting feeling and it's a feeling that

may evolve or change over time. And it's okay for the kid to just sit with that without making any public pronouncements or any irreversible decisions. Well, it's funny. I know that you have Yale in your background. And I remember when I was there, a friend had a younger sister, you know, classic Manhattan elite kind of upbringing. And suddenly she was a lesbian and she, you know, was traveling in those circles. And lo and behold, 10 years later, she married a guy and that was all forgotten. And I thought to myself, that makes perfect sense based on my perception of it, that it was this kind of a thing. It was a trendy thing at the time. It was accepted. And then it just went away. It's the most bizarre thing. And so if someone had done something about it and made it irreversible,

the way we're talking about, you know, it's the title of your book, Irreversible, Dan, damage, that would have been horrific. And so when we come back, we've just got a few minutes left, but I want to talk about how the damage is irreversible and how people need to understand that it's irreversible. And they need to take this very seriously. Folks, I'm talking to Abigail Shrier. The book is Irreversible, Damage, Don't For Way. Folks, I'm talking to Abigail Shrier, her book is Irreversible Damage, the Transgender

Craze, Seducing Our Daughters. Okay, Abigail, so the transgender craze, what? What is irreversible about the damage that's being done? What do you mean by that? Okay, well, on a lower, on a smaller level, a public announcement of a transgender identity on social media starts to solidify that for a young person. Okay?

So there, at that point, a young person very often feels like she can't take it back, even if she no longer feels the same way. But there's, but the irreversible damage that I'm talking about the book in the book is even more, is even scarier. And that is that when you introduce testosterone to a woman's body at 10 to 40 times,

which you would normally have, you're creating a lifetime patient. She must stay on them for the rest of her life unless she wants to, because she'll lose some of the effects if she doesn't. She will very often end with infertility. She will have body and facial hair. She will have alterations to her private anatomy.

and it will deepen her voice. Then if she goes on, there are, of course, all sorts of surgeries that are very often rushed to by this population of girls in distress, like top surgery. Top surgery is a voluntary double mastectomy that destroys biological capacity, both erogenous and, obviously, lactation. But you mean to tell me that this is happening with teenagers, that there are doctors willing to do,

this kind of surgery? Yes, absolutely. I profile some of them in my book. Yeah, a 16-year-old, I mean, depending where they live, right, the age of medical consent varies by state. But depending where you live, and some under 18 require parental approval, some do not. So without even a therapist, no, a young girl can self-diagnose with gender dysphoria, show up at a surgeon's office who's willing to perform it. have both her breastrooms are these Abigail it strikes me that they are very very selfish surgeons

if they're willing to make money off of this well they're being told a lie right they're being told that if they don't do this to appease the the the girl the girl will kill herself so right you know and i know that it's a lie and even if it ends up being true it's still a lie because it's being used to manipulate people. It is, but it's successfully manipulated even the professional organization. Some of these doctors are following the guidelines set out by their own professions. So the problem is even deeper than an individual doctor. It's really, I mean, this is a systemic problem.

I know the word systemic is used a lot, but it really is a systemic problem. You know, I hate to take this to the Nazis, but having written a book on the Third Reich, it just sounds so dramatically similar to me that what was happening in the professions, in Germany, in the 30s, with a national socialist agenda, that it affected the professions.

And there were people in those professions who lacked the courage to stand up. And we just got seconds left. I always hate, of course, to bring it back to the Third Reich. But if people in the professions are not willing to, to stand up and to know what they believe or to say, I'm not going to go along with this quite

yet because we don't have the data. That's all you need. And to think that that's happening in America right now, it's just, it's just horrifying. It's to me. I can only tell you that I wrote this book in part because I was getting so many calls from doctors who were saying that they couldn't express their medical judgment within their professional expertise without fear of being fired. And I realize that if journalists didn't write about this, no one would. It's amazing. Well, first of all, thank you. But I mean, there are worse things than losing one's job. You know, the idea that people will do horrific damage to someone to keep their job. I just want to say that we need more than folks like you writing these books. Maybe it will

put some backbone in some of these professionals because there are children whose futures depend on this. That's the point of your book. We're out of time. Abigail, Trier, Thank you for your point. Thank you for the book, Irreversible Damage. I hope people will grab a copy. Thanks again. Thanks so much.