The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 316. Parenting and the Narcissists of Compassion | Stephanie Davies-Arai

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Dr. Peterson's extensive catalog is available now on DailyWire+: https://utm.io/ueSXh Dr Jordan B Peterson and Stephanie Davies-Arai discuss parenting and the pitfalls of compassion when linked to trans ideology. Stephanie Davies-Arai is the founder and director of Transgender Trend, the leading UK organization calling for evidence-based healthcare for gender dysphoric children and young people and fact-based teaching in schools. She is the author of Communicating with Kids with a background in teacher training and parent support. She was shortlisted for the John Maddox Prize 2018 for the schools guide Supporting gender diverse and trans-identified students in schools. In 2020 Stephanie was an intervener in the High Court in support of Keira Bell and Mrs A, who brought a landmark case against the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service in a claim that under-18s are not old enough to consent to treatment with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. In 2022 Stephanie was awarded the British Empire Medal as founder of Transgender Trend for services to children in the Queen’s Jubilee Birthday Honours list. - Sponsors - Elysium Health: Save 25% off monthly subscriptions with code JBP25: https://www.elysiumhealth.com/ Audible: Try Audible FREE for 30 days. Visit https://audible.com/peterson or text “PETERSON” to 500-500. Exodus90: Is it time for your Exodus? Find resources to prepare at https://exodus90.com/jordan. Black Rifle Coffee: Get 10% off your first order or Coffee Club subscription with code JORDAN: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ - Links - For Stephanie Davies-Arai Communicating With Kids (Book): https://mybodyisme.com/product/book-communicating-with-kids/ Stephanie's Website: https://stephaniedaviesarai.com/ Transgender Trend Website: https://www.transgendertrend.com/ School Resources: https://www.transgendertrend.com/schools-resources/ My Body is Me: https://www.transgendertrend.com/product/my-body-is-me/ An Introductory Guide to Sex and Gender: https://www.transgendertrend.com/product/sex-and-gender/    - Chapters - (0:00) Coming up(1:27) Intro(2:40) When we dislike our own kids(4:00) The importance of duality in parenting(6:40) Optimal family dynamics(10:35) Post-Freudian world, the dismay in peace(19:43) Camps of discipline(24:55) Parenting books, lack of scrutiny(27:24) The terror in total freedom(31:50) Sam Brinton, subjective truth(40:00) Gender identity is the new counter culture(47:45) Creativity and negative flux(53:12) Twenge, self confidence, affirmation(58:52) The folly of self consciousness(1:05:11) Depression spirals(1:08:30) Demi-Boys and unstable categories(1:15:57) Anxiety, women, and social contagion(1:21:00) Objectification and over correction(1:27:55) The job of your therapist(1:35:08) Compassion and the lie of self harm(1:39:00) Facing the narcissism of compassion    // SUPPORT THIS CHANNEL //Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/jordanbpeterson.com/youtubesignupDonations: https://jordanbpeterson.com/donate // COURSES //Discovering Personality: https://jordanbpeterson.com/personalitySelf Authoring Suite: https://selfauthoring.comUnderstand Myself (personality test): https://understandmyself.com // BOOKS //Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life: https://jordanbpeterson.com/Beyond-Order12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos: https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-lifeMaps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief: https://jordanbpeterson.com/maps-of-meaning // LINKS //Website: https://jordanbpeterson.comEvents: https://jordanbpeterson.com/eventsBlog: https://jordanbpeterson.com/blogPodcast: https://jordanbpeterson.com/podcast // SOCIAL //Twitter: https://twitter.com/jordanbpetersonInstagram: https://instagram.com/jordan.b.petersonFacebook: https://facebook.com/drjordanpetersonTelegram: https://t.me/DrJordanPetersonAll socials: https://linktr.ee/drjordanbpeterson #JordanPeterson #JordanBPeterson #DrJordanPeterson #DrJordanBPeterson #DailyWirePlus

Hello everyone watching or listening on YouTube, or associated podcast or on the daily wire plus platform. I have the privilege today of speaking to Stephanie Davies-Arry. She is a decorated author and the founder, as well as the director of Transgender Trend, a UK-based organization that has been perpetually under fire by leftist activists, simply for advocating for evidence-based healthcare when it comes to gender dysphoric children. she's also the author of Communicating with Kids, book published in 2015, based in her background, training teachers and providing parental support. Davies Array is also notable for being an intervener in the high court during the landmark

case, Bell versus Tavistock, which concluded that persons under 18 cannot consent to puberty blockers. So Stephanie, I was reading your book today, 2015 book, Communicating with Children, and I thought, maybe I could playfully put you on the spot. In my first book, 12 Rules for Life, my first popular book, I have a chapter entitled, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. And so what I thought I'd ask you, given, given that you wrote this book, detailing out different means of communicating with children,

developing a philosophy of communication with children. Kind of wondering what you think of that rule? How does that strike you? Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. I love that you started with that because that's the bit in your book, which I've read, that jumped out at me because that's what I say to parents.

Of course you love your children to bits, you die for them, but do you like them? Because that's really important in day-to-day living. But the other thing I say is that it's not only important that you like your own kids, but that other parents do, and other people outside, because otherwise your kids are going to have a really hard time, and you're not going to be doing them a favour, if you bring them up to be unpopular with other kids' parents because they're going to depend on them. So let me outline a few ideas for you and you tell me criticize away or agree as you see fit. So I think we know there's a large literature indicating that it's better

for children to have two parents. And I think the reason for that, this is my reasoning for it, there's a variety of reasons. Obviously raising children and working is very difficult. So being able to split the labor is a way of perhaps not being entirely exhausted when you have small children. But I think there's something else going on too, which is more, it's a kin in some sense to the reason that there's sexual differentiation at a biological level. So there's sexual differentiation

because it's useful to bring together two disparate creatures to produce a new variant. But I also think it's true on the personality front. So if you have a nicely organized marriage, you're gonna have your bits of insanity and your partner's gonna have their bits of insanity. But if you can form a joint union, then I believe you can produce something

approximating one sane person. And so, and that person is sane, that joint person is sane not so much because they're sane psychologically, but because they're an analog of the broader social world. So, and I'm making, I'm saying that for a specific reason. So, then the theory would be, if your children are acting in a way that both of you find displeasing, if you're honest, then the probability that other people will find that displeasing is extremely high because you at least love your children, whereas other people, you know, they might be willing to give them a chance, but they're not going to die for them.

And so, if you accept the additional hypothesis that the primary role of a parent is to prepare their children for what would you say, welcome acceptance into the broader social world, then you have a moral obligation to guide your children in some sense in accordance with your own joint feelings. If the two of you find your child's behavior unacceptable, you're morally obligated to let the child know because that is not going to translate well to other children, to other children's parents, to teachers, to any situations in public.

And then your child's gonna have a miserable time of it. And I think the research literature indicates that very clearly. Yeah, and I think you're right in the sense that the children need the male and the female, the masculine and the feminine, but that can be achieved in other ways. I've worked with all kinds of families. So my work is about creating the optimum situation for families, no matter what the, whether they're married or what kind of family situation they're in. So I would agree, and particularly that a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r

gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r to find those role models that are close family members because I, you know, all very good friends of the family that it has to be a close relationship. I mean, teachers as well, but there are other adults who can fill that gap and that is right that I think is very important that that gap is filled if the family isn't that a male-female unit of marriage that is the traditional unit. Right, because the children have to learn, okay, so there's two elements there, so you bring a mother and a father together and the child gets the benefit of their joint

personality, right? The fact that they've got two people to hit against, and hopefully that makes one the same person. But the socialization rules for being feminine and the socialization rules for being masculine aren't identical. And so that's part of the reason why it's necessary to have those contrary, controversial role models at hand. And at hand does mean something like making a relationship

with, because the other thing we know about children is they can establish multiple deep relationships with people, so they can actually stand multiple caregivers, but they don't really like a lot of change in their caregivers. They don't like relationships once they're established to be decimated, let's say. Well, neither do adults, but it's even more the case for children.

And so, yeah, and it's harder for a single parent family for someone who's running a single parent family to fill that, well, fill that diversity of personality to solve that problem, but also to provide the contraceptual role model. So... I agree, I mean, I think that consistency is really important for children

and it's fractured in so many ways now in society because if people move around more people don't tend to stay in those units or those extended family groups in one area. So we have more and more Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r So, yes, to try and create that consistency for children in their relationships, in their close family relationships, I think is one of the things that's very important. Having said that, there are all sorts of situations that are not optimum for children, and children are robust. So, you can look at in our Western society for example, to remember the fact that our children are you know generally very privileged compared to other

parts of the world. And so we can get I think to concerned about what the negative aspects to concerned about what the negative aspects about society are and forget the fact that children are generally robust, they are programmed to survive and to get on. And so we shouldn't be too careful or too worried about the kind of disadvantages they face in a western society where they have many advantages. Yes, well, you talk about the fact that parents now exist and what you described as a post-Freudian world. And so there is this idea based on, I would say, an oversimplified reading of Freud that all psychological problems that adults suffer from are a consequence of trauma often associated with poor parenting in childhood. And first of all, no, because there's lots of reasons to have psychological distresses

and adult that have nothing to do with your parents, mean, as the existential psychotherapists pointed out very clearly in the 50s, just that catastrophes associated with being alive are sufficient to cause people a substantial amount of depression and anxiety and hopelessness. So it doesn't have to be all bad parenting.

And secondly, the extremes of terrible parenting that Freud noted aren't really, I wouldn't say they're uncommon, but they're not typical. So Freud was particularly concerned with eadipal parenting, and that would be, well, I suppose the modern equivalent of that is something like helicopter parenting. He's the potential damage done by someone who cares so much for their children that they're completely unable to give them any autonomy whatsoever. But I think it's useful for parents to know that as you just pointed out, the children

are quite robust and they can adapt to a variety of circumstances. And also that what you're trying to do with your children is actually have a relationship with them. And one of the things that characterizes robust human relationships is that they can actually stay intact across a wide variety of emotional scenarios. You know, sometimes people in my clients used to wonder, for example, if they could, they should ever

fight in front of their children. And my response to that always was, it's not whether or not you fight, it's whether or you reconcile. And so what you want to do is model for your children the fact that there's going to be conflict about very important and difficult issues, some of those interpersonal but some of them just practical. That conflict is actually going to produce a fair bit of emotion, some of which might be negative and even rather intense,

but that those things can be negotiated through and the relationship can come back together. We know, for example, even by studying our close primate relatives, that chimpanzees, that the males, for example, are extremely fractious in their interpersonal interactions, but they're also, the sophisticated ones are also extremely good at reconciling and peacemaking. And so, while the point of all this is that, your children are perfectly capable of adapting to a wide range of emotional events, positive and negative. And what you want to help them understand is that,

the relationship you have with them and with each other, if you're married, is of the relationship you have with them and with each other, if you're married, is of the sort that's going to be able to withstand the full range of emotional expression without breaking apart. And so, you don't have to worry about them being fragile and you don't have to worry in some sense, even about making mistakes with them, as long as you're doing that in the same way you would do that with someone with whom you really want to maintain a long-term relationship. It's a very rare married couple who don't fight,

don't ever fight and don't ever, and one of the things that I think is important, as you say that children may see you fight and and and of course by that I don't mean hugely aggressive throwing things or beating a partner up, but the normal kind of arguments and fights that a couple would get into. If the children observe that then I think you're right that it's important that they also see the making up, but they also learn that you're not perfect that conflict exists and that people resolve it and that it doesn't destroy you. So I think that is really important. The other thing is about anger and conflict and argument is as you say just a normal part of life. So if you try, and this is what I see, the pressure on parents and particularly mothers to be nice all the time, to be kind and nice and never do anything in front of the children, and you create a kind of false sort of family.

And it's some of the families I know that I think have the most healthy relationships the ones that shout at each other quite a lot. You know they're quite volatile in the way that they do so but they're very honest and they make up and they're very very close in loving families. So you can't you know you get it and then and then there are other families that try death, or the parents try desperately hard to always present a loving and kind and nice front. And everything's false. Yes, and everything's under the surface then. And that I think is very, very confusing.

And anxiety provoking in children when you can feel the undercurrents as children can, but nobody's saying anything out loud. Right, well that's part of that extended eduple complex in some sense, is that the issue is, I mean, it's perfectly reasonable for people to work towards having peace in their household. But peace is actually extremely difficult to establish and maintain, because peace means that both of you agree, and also peace means that there's nothing

unbelievably complicated facing you at the moment about which you have no idea, and you have no idea how to approach it. If you have a sick child, for example, and you're trying to sort through how to discipline a child like that, let's say, or what medical pathway to walk down, there's no way you can avoid having conflict if you're going to think about it, because it's a very serious issue. You have to think about it seriously, and that means you

have to discuss it, and if you have a different viewpoint, that discussion can get quite heated. But there's no difference between that and thinking that heated discussion. And unless you sort through, say, the complexities on the disciplinary and the medical treatment front, you actually don't have peace, right? You just have a problem. Now, what happens in the families that insist upon presenting this, you might say, gingerbread house world of false peace to their children is that they're pretending constantly that every problem is solved and peace actually reigns, but they're telling the children often through nonverbal behavior that

any conflict whatsoever is so disruptive and so intolerable that we have to pretend all the time that no conflict whatsoever exists. And so all that does is turn children into creatures that are terrified of their own negative emotions. So they feel that if that if peace is so necessary and So, they feel that if that if peace is so necessary and psyche is so fragile, but no emotion whatsoever is allowed on the negative side, then any problem must be of terrifying proportions and only something to avoid. And that's definitely, that's definitely a catastrophe for children, especially because they can, especially when they're little, they can be quite volatile, right? I mean, if they're tired or hungry or hot or cold and they get volatile, they get upset. And then if they're feeling that they're breaking the eggshells

underneath the carpet or rattling the skeletons in the closet, that's just not good for them at all. Yeah, it teaches children to be afraid of conflict and disagreement and argument and Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r ymdyn, ac mae'r discipline, that is the parents job, it's the adults job and a child isn't, you know, and then the parents should be able to reach some agreement or compromise and then, you know, proceed, but that shouldn't be part of the child's job. It's not the child's job to, you know.

Yeah, well, you talked about two camps of discipline, camp A and camp B, camp A associated with order, let's say an integration into the social world and camp B associated with KOS and individuation. And that's kind of a conservative liberal split there too. And I suppose that does reflect the fact that children have two problems to solve as they mature, broadly speaking. One is, well, how do I get along with my parents and my siblings and my friends and my teachers, the whole social world? How do I fit in?

So, that's problem number one. So, that means, how do I conduct myself so that people appreciate having me around and I'm a valued social member? And the second problem is, well, how do I stand on my own two feet and also become a reliable source of creative individuality and some ability to push back against the mindlessness of the group? And that is an optimization problem. It's very complex. And there's no simple answer to that, partly because it depends on the situation and it depends on the child. And so parents definitely have to negotiate that out. I found with my wife, I probably was,

I'd probably make the first disciplinary move in like 75% of the cases, maybe 60% of the cases in our marriage. I don't think that's that uncommon because men are more likely to intervene by and large than women are, because they're less agreeable. But I also found, you know, most of the time, although my wife and I were pretty much on

the same page with our kids, if I just shut the hell up for 15 seconds when the kids were misbehaving, she would respond. And it was so interesting because her threshold for tolerating misbehavior was not very much different than mine. It was literally, say, on average 15 seconds. But because it was reliably, she was reliably somewhat more patient, that did mean that in some circumstances, the bulk of the initial disciplinary moves fell to me.

So that's another thing that's interesting for people to know too. You might be closer than you think on the disciplinary fronts, just one person's little quicker on the draw than the other. And so, sorry, please go ahead. It's just, it's back to sharing values, isn't it? If you've got essentially the same values about how you want to bring your child up and how you want your child to be in the world, what your goals are for the way you raise a child, then you can probably work those things out as adults together. And yeah, it's not as big a deal. So we could lay out some of those

principles, and I think that'd be useful for people who are watching. So let's take that campaign, campaign, and campaign. We'll start with campaign. And that would be the more conservative side. Look, it's really important that your children are popular and welcome. And that doesn't mean because they've sold their soul to the group. It means because they can play fair and they're productive and generous. And they know how to take turns. And they don't win too much when they lose and they don't try to amph to annoyingly when

they win and they're good at reciprocity, they're good play partners and that's really crucially important to kids. The literature on the development of criminal behavior, anti-social behavior in children shows quite clearly that there's a subset of kids who are quite aggressive at the age of two, most of them are boys. Most of them get socialized by the time they're four. But some of them don't, and the ones that don't start out their sad little social lives as social rejects. What happens is they fall farther and farther behind because the other

kids start to play together because they can stand each other, they start to develop friendships. And within those friendships, they scaffold their social growth. And so what that means is that if your child is unlikable at four, maybe because you didn't help socialize them sufficiently between you and your wife, then other children will reject them and then they're really in trouble. And the literature I was familiar with indicated that if your child doesn't make a smooth entry into the social world, somewhere between the ages of three and five, there's almost nothing that can be done after that to remediate that.

It's such a serious problem. And so one thing that parents could be aiming at is, well, this is why you don't let your children do anything, it makes you dislike them because you want other people to welcome them. So they need to be able to modulate their behavior in a socially acceptable way. So that's on the conservative side, on the liberal side, you'd say, well, you don't want your child just to be like a clone of the group. You want them to have some individuality and some autonomy. And so you might have to argue between you about what the balance is between those two

things in relationship to your particular child, because it needs to be particularized. But those are good aims, an autonomous child who knows how to play well with others. That's a pretty good deal for the child and for the world and for you as parents. Yeah, and this is why when I research parent books, parenting advice books, and I think the parenting advice industry doesn't get enough scrutiny, actually. I'm not a big fan of parenting books, but they tend to be either the kind of quite authoritarian or quite liberal. And in my book I point out that actually there are good things about both the renecissary things about both as individuation and integration and you know both of those things

have and so you take the bits from each model and you put them together because both of those are important and some of those some of the advice in the more authoritarian books is good. Some of it I don't think is good at all. And the same with the other way, it's important that children are individuals, it's important that we listen to children more than we used to. But what I've seen is it's the liberal parenting side that has come into ascendancy over the last two decades. And that runs right across the social spectrum of parents.

You get working-class parents, middle-class parents, are very liberal. And I think most of the books are on that side. And that creates a huge imbalance in hoping that your child will become a fully rounded human being who feels good about himself, but also fits into society, but doesn't become a sheep or a cog in the well, as you say. So I think we have this huge imbalance for children that doesn't make them happy. And that what one of the things that I think is important, if you want that sort of freedom for your child, that you create a structure and you cannot really have freedom without structure because that's chaos. And that's terrifying for children. But I think the whole focus is on this idea that children are born whole with a fully formed self, that it's the parent's job to facilitate expression of that self.

And I think this... So let's dig into that a little bit. So you were concerned in these statements about the tilt towards more liberal parenting. So first thing I might comment about that is that being extremely liberal can also be a perfectly valid excuse for neglect because it actually takes real detailed attention to your children's behavior

to help them walk the appropriate social path. And if you're not attending, you let them get away with everything, you can justify that by saying, well, what I'm doing is trying to individuate my child. I don't want to put any social restrictions on them because that's all hemming in their natural, preformed, perfect creativity. And so, and then you give yourself an easy out. And that's, that's not helpful partly. And that's partly also been driven by this idiot insistence that

self-esteem is only internal and it's only psychological. And that's an unbelievably pathological model of self-esteem. And I would thank the social psychologists for that mostly, because a huge amount of what your child would experience, let's say, as self-esteem, which is actually, by the way, technically, control of negative emotion, isn't a consequence of the individuated nature of their psyche. It's a consequence of the fact that other people can stand having them around without being mean and rejecting all the time. So if you have a child who

knows how to play by the age of three, let's say, and can share and isn't too whiny and isn't too triumphant and can reciprocate, then you can send them off to daycare, you can send them off to pre-kindergarten, and they'll make friends. And then when they go to school, they have friends, and the teachers like them. And so they aren't suffering from the kind of negative emotion that people would confuse with low self-esteem. But it's not because particularly because they're individuated or well-integrated, inter-sightly. It's because their behavior is well regulated socially,

and so they integrate well into the community, and so other people don't exclude and torture them. And so we really do have a warped and russoli in view of the way that children develop, right? Is there perfect in and of themselves, except in so far as parents impose pathological, parents of society impose pathological restrictions on them. And it's, as you said, you pointed out another thing, which is don't be confused and freedom and chaos. Like, if you give your children

carte blanche, all that means is that they're impulsive and anxious. It does not mean they're free. An optimally free child is actually playing a structured game. Now, we know games are fun, but we also know games run by principles. They run by rules. The rules aren't exactly there to constrain and ham in, like you'd think if you were a resilient. The rules are actually preconditioned for a very complex sort of freedom. And the basic rules of social interaction, like reciprocity and not winding too much

when you lose and not being too triumphant when you win, those are the basic rules of social interaction. And they actually facilitate freedom rather than being antithetical to it. It's a freedom, total freedom without boundaries is terrifying, absolutely terrifying. It is chaos and for a child that is terrifying. But the child is always always pushing for those boundaries that they expect. And I think she'll be children are born absolutely expecting the adult to know what they're doing and to guide them. And so they push to find out where

that boundary is and that's the little child's job really. And if the parent doesn't provide that boundary then the child has to push further and further and further and come to a place that does not make them happy. It makes them anxious and nervous. So, you know, you know, okay, so let's, let's segue there then because that, look, that, I'm going to tell you a little story here and then you'll see where I'm going with this very quickly. So there's this individual in the Biden administration in Washington. And he's in charge of disposal of all nuclear waste in the U.S. if I remember correctly. Now, he's a non-binary by public pronouncement. He's bald, often has a mustache, wears pretty flashy dresses, and has posted a fair bit of his sexual behavior publicly. So you can find pictures of him, for example,

displayed out on a slab, bondaged up in rope, all prepared for whatever activity he's prone to engage in. There are pictures of him with men kneeling by his side with dog masks on. He's quite a bit of fun. So, you might say if you are skeptical that he's pushing the boundaries and he keeps pushing them and pushing them. So far, he hasn't found any boundaries because not only has he not been stopped in his public display of his impulse of hedonism, let's say,

but he's been highly rewarded because not only was he granted a very plum government position, which he may or may not have been competent enough to occupy, but he also got a tremendous amount of publicity for it. And then you might think, well, that's good enough, you know, he's those aren't he didn't need to encounter any boundaries. He was just pursuing his individuated creativity. But then it turned out a month and a half ago that he stole a suitcase from an airport in Minnesota. And it happened to be a suitcase full of women's clothing.

And then he happened to lie about it to the police and said that was an accident. And he got called out on the carpet pretty hard for that socially, but he didn't get fired. Because apparently that even that wasn't pushing the envelope far enough. And so then, you know what? That wasn't good enough for him. He had to go to Bloody California and steal another suitcase and get caught. And this time he got fired. And so, you talked about this bias towards liberal parenting, let's say, and you put that in the context of children pushing the boundaries and you put it in the context of anxiety. So let's think of it this way. Children and adults can be overwhelmed by the

complexity of the world. And they want a structure like a game to hold back that complexity. That's why you need routines in your household. That's why you need predictability in terms of your caretakers. That's why you need rules of the game. It's so that things don't get out of hand. Now, let's say that you adopt an extremely liberal parenting orientation and your children start to push the boundaries. Well, you're not going to stop them and so that means they're going to push the boundaries harder and harder. And that's going to make them more and more anxious because there's not enough structure. And then let's say they hit teenage hood and puberty. And maybe you're unfortunate. You have a girl who hits puberty little early and she's

little immature and she's little on the little sensitive to negative emotion. Maybe not quite as popular as she might be, and she's quite confused and anxious, and she starts pushing the boundaries pretty damn hard on the gender identity front. And then you've got real trouble, especially if she's also being exposed to a passel of idiot teachers who are doing everything they possibly can to capitalize on her confusion. And so it seems to me that what we are seeing in the gender dysphoria front, which is a form of social contagion and a psychogenic epidemic is an extension of boundary pushing behavior.

It's so a girl can come up to her parent when she's 12 and do a bunch of things at the same time. She can say, I think maybe I'm a boy. Okay, so what exactly is going on there? Well, certainly a challenge to social authority, it's a challenge to parental authority. It's an expression of a deep discontent and a level of chaotic anxiety and confusion. And then it's also the only way, as far as I can tell,

that the child can test the relationship between the teachers and their ideology, say gender-affirming ideology and the rules at home, that the parents are trying to abide by, because the kids at school are gonna be taught, look, everybody's got to subjectively define the identity, and you might not be as masculine or feminine as you've been led to believe. And anyone who tells you different is a detestable bigot to such a degree that you should actually

keep all of this secret and never even talk to them. It's like how the hell is a kid going to sort through all that without going home and saying something like, mom, sometimes I think, maybe I'm a girl. Like, because they're not going to be able to delineate this out in some complex philosophical manner. Adults can't bloody well do that. And so, sorry, that's a bit of a rant, but you can see where I'm going here. Well, yeah, I mean, how can kids, how can teenagers rebel against their parents anymore? They, you know, They can't be goths, they can't be punks, they can't be emotes, they can go into drugs and drink maybe. The adolescents job is to separate from the parents and we know that adolescents are far more influenced

by their peer group than their parents. this is the agony for parents because they're at an age where parents should be letting go, should be widening those, those, that boundary, so that the child can push against the boundary of the outside world more as they take this journey, which is from childhood to adulthood. It's a rocky road for a lot of teenagers, most, I would say. And so that pushing against the boundaries, part of that job is to reject the parents and reject the parents' values. And so parents have had a lesson that's even more in a position where they're tearing their hair out because they know that if they're giving advice to their children, that's not the advice their kids are listening to. They're listening to what's going on in the peer group. So it's a huge thing for society to have been put on to this generation of children and

that parents feel helpless about. And the parents job in adolescence is really to walk, to tread that line, and particularly in this area of speaking the truth, giving that children facts, that is a responsibility of parents and you may be the only person in that child's life who is doing that. And it's also to allow the child more freedom

and more freedom of expression. So it's a real dance between, and it's all about keeping up a good, strong relationship with that child and keeping communication channels open. Right. Well, in some ways, you can think about the model you used, which is, say, integration versus individuation, is that as the child becomes more autonomous, putting more stress

on individuation makes more and more sense, right? Because you've already laid down the groundwork for their social acceptance. And then as they move into adolescence, first of all, they can't abide by your household rules entirely because they never leave home if that was the case, right? They have to have that drive towards independence.

And that's going to mean establishing their own system of values in some sense so that they can move away from you and do that autonomously. And so they are going to be set against you in some real sense. The problem is that, well, I suppose part of the problem that parents run into at the moment is that that's been weaponized. That proclivity has been weaponized in the name of this extremely strange gender ideology that insists that identity.

Well, we can take that apart a little bit. That might be useful. So one of the things that really strikes me as odd as a psychologist, there's two things, I suppose. When I look at modern claims about identity, the first is that identity is subjectively defined. I think that is so utterly preposterous. I can't believe that we're even entertaining it as a culture. It's so idiotic. Every single time I have a conversation with my wife or with anyone else for that matter.

But let's say with my wife, I'm negotiating my identity just as she's negotiating hers because we have our viewpoints and our proclivities for action and we have our each of us have our tendency to insist that our way is the right way, but if you're gonna be around other people You have to constantly negotiate that so that you can stand each other. And so, a real identity is actually the ability to negotiate the transformation of your own identity in a social space.

There's nothing to do with you subjectively defining your identity. So that's, now, the, as far as I can tell, the only people who are unable to negotiate identity and who insist upon having it subjectively defined are literally two years old. It's according to Piaget, and there's some good research support for the basic outlines of his theory. Two-year-olds are two egocentric to negotiate a shared play space. So their identity is subjectively defined, and they're almost entirely hedonistically oriented,

which means they run by whim, which everyone knows if you're around two-year-olds, and they can't play with other children. Okay, so the idea that identity is subjectively defined is utterly preposterous. And it's actually an anti-truth, because if you try to define your identity subjectively, you are a bloody tyrant, and you're going to be an unpopular one too, and you deserve it. But then, secondarily, we have this other weird insistence,

and I don't know why we've become so demanded that we also accept this, that your identity is subjectively defined. But nonetheless, the core element of your identity is some immutable group characteristic. And the one we stress most is sexual attraction. And I suppose the secondary one is something like race. It's like so. It's so peculiar that your identity is subjectively defined, but it's also boxed into this very narrow set of parameters, which is, well, the most important thing about

you is who and to what degree, to whom and to what degree are you sexually attracted? Like, that's just, it just leaves me speechless. Well, it doesn't, like you get my point. So I think what we're seeing is this idea of subjective identity taken to, it's absolutely extreme. Because you're right, you know, up to two years old. It amazes me how so many parenting books are based on building your child's self-esteem. Well, sorry, your child is born, your child is only self-esteem. You're nothing else, you know, they for their survival they have to be. So it's not the adult's job to build the child's self-esteem as if that's something we can put on them.

It's part of your child's interaction with life, with the environment, in relationships that build self esteem. So it might be achievement. It might be, yeah, something that you can do, something that you achieve, and then you feel good about yourself. It's not your parents always telling you, you're amazing, you're brilliant, and praising them.

And also that idea of identity, it's the idea of the self, this thing that you're supposed to be born with. And I don't know what myself is yet, and I'm 63. I don't know because it changes, it changes according to circumstances. I don't know if I'd be a great person to be on a lifeboat with, for example. Would I be the one that stood up and saved people, helped save others? Would I be so scared? I don't know. I don't know myself and I don't believe a'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r fforddd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r ffordd o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r been completely reversed between adult and child. So we are encouraged to see children as wise and as knowing themselves and that we follow the child, you know, you hear parents say, I've learned far more from my child than they've ever learned from me. Well, that's the wrong way

around. You know, you are the adult, you are the one that's gathered life experience and hopefully some wisdom. And again, to put that responsibility onto a child to be the all-knowing fount of wisdom. And we do that to teenagers as well. But when you look at the adolescent years, that identity formation becomes really the adolescence job. Who am I? So, I'm not a child anymore. I'm developing into an adult. Who am I? What is, and what teenagers do is they find their tribe and they find, and they, in a way, they integrate before they can individuate because they find the tribe and they wear the same and they speak the same language and they like the same music or now YouTube videos and

The rules that you know we may mock this you know, I've heard people mock it But it's it's absolutely right that you know, it's a stage of development and now the only tribe that you might describe as any kind of counter-tulture is trans having a gender and sexual identity and there is no other tribe that children can join to show that they don't conform or that they're a bit different or that you know it's it's it's only gender identity now. So if you wanna be seen as boring and conventional and traditional and conservative

and everything that a teenager doesn't want to appear to be, then you have to join that tribe and at least say, oh, I'm non-binary or to be able to show that side of yourself unless you're really comfortable in the idea that you're conventional and you don't have a problem with that. Well, that means that they've captured, so I'll go in two directions with regard to what you said.

Years ago, I did a study with a colleague of mine at Harvard on when tattooing and piercing first entered the cultural scene. And we were curious about whether that was a marker for psychopathology or what was predicting the adoption of these new fashion trends. And what we found overwhelmingly was that it wasn't associated with an increased prevalence of mental illness. It was associated with high trait openness and that's the creativity dimension from the big five trait openness and when you see people with rainbow colored hair and multi colored hair and piercings and so forth. You're looking at people who are on the creative end of the distribution and the point you're making is in part that the collapse of the

entire domain of non-conformity into gender identity also entices the creative kids. Creative kids have more mutable identities too. So they claim that, well, I'm a different person from day to day is particularly germane to creative kids because a creative person is quite different from day to day. That's actually the definition of creativity. And if you're creative and high and negative emotion, that's even worse because not only are you mutable on the identity side, that's actually your identity, that mutability. You're also very, very volatile in terms of your moves. And so the idea that identity is only mutable can be very, very attractive to you. Now, I also wanted to make a comment technically about self-esteem. So I spent a lot of time analyzing self-esteem psychometrically, because as a clinician, I was extremely skeptical of the social psychological research, purporting to indicate, for example, that there was even

such a thing as self-esteem, because we bandy about these words, but that doesn't mean they have a corresponding grounding in reality. So I looked at and conducted factor analytic studies, which were designed to assess what exactly self-esteem was. And it's quite straightforward. And people who are listening might find this extremely useful practically. There's no such thing as self-esteem. What there is is trait neuroticism,

which is proclivity to anxiety and pain, essentially emotional and physical. So people differ in their thresholds for being anxious and hurt. And if you're more sensitive, well, then you'll see threats before people who are less sensitive and that can be useful. And if you're less sensitive, well, then you're more robust

and maybe more daring and that can be useful. Nope, there's no way of saying what's right in that situation. However, if you're high in neuroticism, if you're high in sensitivity to negative emotion, you do experience a lot of anxiety and depression. Okay, so self-esteem is basically neuroticism minus extroversion. An extroversion is the positive emotion dimension. And so highly neurotic people, so people sensitive to negative emotion, are more likely to be self-conscious and to think negative thoughts about themselves.

But that doesn't mean that it's a fractured self-concept that's driving the negative emotion. That's simply not true. That negative emotional state is actually baseline temperament. You can measure it in infants. You can measure it in kids that are six months old. And you can ameliorate it to some degree. If you have a child who's sensitive to negative emotion, and you facilitate their exploration,

their autonomous exploration, they can normalize their psychophysiology. Okay, so first of all, there's no such thing as self-esteem. It's basically trait neuroticism. And second, you do not remediate trait neuroticism by getting people to focus on their feelings. In fact, making people self-conscious about their feelings makes trait neuroticism worse, because there's no difference between being self-conscious and being high and trait neuroticism. So, and then the last part of all of that that's preposterous

is you certainly don't remediate people's self-esteem. You talk about this in your book with regards to over praise by continually telling children how wonderful they are because what actually regulates their negative emotion to say it again isn't their internal psychological state or their attitude towards themselves. It's whether or not other people like to have them around. So if you have a child who is very popular, surrounded by friends, who's got a couple of best friends, whose teachers respond positively to them, who other parents respond to well,

who can regulate their behavior when they're out in public in a grocery store or restaurant, so that adults are kind and smile to them. The probability that they're gonna experience negative excess, negative emotion is tremendously ameliorated. And so that's another strike on the conservative side, like a hit on the conservative side of the parenting spectrum. It's like you help make your children socially acceptable and you will increase their self-esteem. You don't do that by giving them participation awards at school and falsely inflating their ego.

That's really interesting what you say about self-esteem, yeah, because it's very, it is bandied around it. It's part of parenting advice, you know, so much now, but really, what does it mean? Does it mean a sense of satisfaction with yourself, does it mean? Because there is a healthy, you know, I guess there's like a healthy kind of confidence that you, in life, but again, I think that's so much generated by how you react with the world's, we're social creatures. And if we cannot have or develop a positive relationship with the world and our environment and the people we meet, then we're not likely to have a feeling of kind of confidence in ourselves. But I think you're right about the, there are, there are innate personality characteristics or temperaments and they can be tempered and they can be helped so that the child is, you get the positive side of that more than the negative side because

with every temperament there is a positive and a negative and that what you want is to go with your child's character or personality and encourage the positive side of that more than facilitating the negative. Maybe that's the closest we can get to building your child self-esteem. Well, I talk to this psychologist a week, two weeks ago, Jean Twainty. And Twainty is pretty good psychologist. She's a good statistician. She's good at psychological measurement,

which is really important when you're dealing with the sorts of things we're talking about. And for a long time on the self-esteem front, there was this idea that positive affirmations for children were the way to self-esteem. But that was dependent on the theory that your level of negative emotion was dependent on your attitude towards yourself, something like that.

It was only a psychological variable. But what Twainy found was that all that false praise, that devaluation of the currency of reward, that over generalization of insistence upon your child's singular wonderfulness at the expense of other people. It didn't improve self-esteem. What it did was inflate narcissism. So then you got the best of both worlds.

You got kids that were just as miserable on the negative emotion front, just as confused and anxious, but they're also narcissistic. And so that actually produced a bit of a spiral because it's a little bit more difficult to make friends if you're high and negative emotion because you're a bit more volatile, you're a bit more sensitive, you're also a little more timid

in your social interactions. So you're already gone a couple of things working against you. Now, if you add a nice, healthy dose of narcissism to that, then you're gonna to produce a child who's unbelievably unpopular and dislikable because there's almost no one more dislikable than a neurotic narcissist. That's a tough combination, too, because you get that hypersensitivity along with grand iosity.

You might be able to tolerate one of those, but man, the combination of that's pretty damn unbearable. And so all this idiot insistence on self-esteem through continual affirmation, you know, that would also be part and parcel of the elimination of competition in schools, right? Because you don't want anybody to lose because God only knows what that might do to their self-concept and their self-esteem. you produce this increase in self-centered narcissism, and you make kids more isolated and miserable and lonely than they would have otherwise had to be. It's a real perfect storm. A lot of that can be laid at the feet of social psychologists, by the way. So doing very, very badly, thought through, and analyzed research in clinical domains. The cell-hole self-esteem bloody monstrous movement,

that's one of the catastrophes that's emerged out of the research fields. I also think parents have been encouraged to be therapists to their children, to be counselors. And what you mentioned earlier about feelings, when I worked with parents, it was constantly, you know, a child would come home and say, I don't see somebody kick me in the playground. And the first question from the parent was not, so what did you do about it or what happened, but, and how did that make you feel? And I, you know, that, that, how did that make you feel? And how did you feel about that? And what it does is it gives

power to feelings above actions. And so you get a child who, then the child stops and thinks, well, how did I feel about it? And it's usually, you know, sad or angry or happy. You know, this sort of very limited range of feeling words. And so then the child's thinking, that's the important thing. And it's always back to the child looking internally, rather than looking outside and saying, so this was what the situation was. And then maybe if the child was being bullied

or maybe if the child had a part in it, we, you know, we listened to that, we can, you know, perhaps help the child manage it better next time or maybe the child doesn't have a problem with it at all. It's just sharing some information with us. But if we bring that back every time to the child's feelings and the child is growing up thinking, my feelings are the most important thing. Okay, so, so let's, Okay, so let's look at that.

So first of all, we might ask, what the hell do we mean by feeling? And what we mean is something like immediate emotional response. Okay, and then we say, well, feelings are paramount. We're also simultaneously saying immediate emotional response is paramount.

Okay, so let's just think about that for a minute. So let's say my wife says something that makes me angry. All right, so why aren't I just right? It's like you just said something that made me angry. Now I'm angry, my feelings are paramount. I'm angry, I feel like hurting you, let's say, because I'm so angry. Why am I not right in doing that?

And why are we insisting to children that their instantaneous emotional impulse is the appropriate marker for reality? Because the alternatives would be, well, who cares what you felt about it? What did you do about it? Or on the bully in front, let's say, what are you going to do about it? What did you do about it? Or on the bullying front, let's say, what are you going to do about it? Independent of your feelings, whether you're angry or upset or looking for a fight or challenge, whatever. I want to know how you're going to cope with this situation actively, so it doesn't occur again. And then by walking through that, let's say if you're talking to a teenager, you're also privileging thinking over feeling. And so then you might say, well, what is thinking?

And the answer is thinking and acting are what mature people replace feeling with. So the only time we need to feel something, especially on the negative emotion side, is really when things don't go the way we want them to go. So you feel, forget about positive emotion for a minute, you feel in consequence of inadequate adaptation. That's like a rule. And so, to privilege feeling means you're privileging inadequate adaptation. And you're also saying, well, your first impulsive whim,

which is driven by these basic biological mechanisms that are very in like in the Freudian sense, they're not sophisticated at all. By making them paramount, you raise them to the point of the highest virtue. The highest virtue is what you feel. And then it's even worse than that, Stephanie, because this is so awful.

It really is. If you do careful linguistic analysis of communicative content, one of the things and emotions, let's say communicative content and emotion, one of the things you find reliably is all self-conscious thoughts load on neuroticism. So there is literally no difference between thinking about how you feel and being miserable. They are exactly the same thing. So what you're doing with it's so sad, right? But you can kind of understand this if you think about self-consciousness. So imagine you're on stage and you're delivering a talk. And all of a sudden you get self-conscious. Well, you think self-consciousness is a good thing.

It's like, no, it's not. You sweat, you blush, you stutter, you forget what you're doing, you collapse into yourself, you get self-centered, you don't pay attention to the audience, you're no longer able to communicate. And it can be real catastrophe. Like people can get so self-conscious on stage that they develop a phobia of public speaking. And that's all pathology of self-consciousness. And so now what we do with our children at every bloody turn, and they do this in school all the time, how are you feeling?

How are you feeling? How are you feeling? How are you feeling? And the other implication there, and you talk a lot about nonverbal behavior in your book and how we communicate with children, we're also telling our children all the time that if you feel bad, anxiety, let's say, or some emotional pain, That's so awful that that's all sensible and caring adults should ever care about. And so what kind of message is that for children? It's like, oh my God, you know, you were upset at school. What a cataclysm that is. We should probably restructure the entire social apparatus

so that never even happens once. It's so, it's multi-dimensionally preposterous and it's really hurting kids to make them self-conscious like that. So I love what you say about self-consciousness and causing depression and I mean it's you can see it so clearly in this idea that children well adolescents in particular now have this new childhood task of exploring their gender identity because what yn ymwch i'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ysgwyrddio'r ygwyr is about, it's a workbook for teenagers on exploring your gender identity. And basically you're looking at every aspect of your personality, everything about you, and relating it to gender, does that make me a girl or does that make me a boy? And of course, it's inevitably based on stereotypes. It can't be anything else because boys can't experience female things

like menstruation and girls can't experience male things like erections, let's say, you know, it's got to be stereotypes, there's nothing else. And you know, one of these books that I read because teenagers now, there's a plethora of books, including workbooks, to help you along your gender journey. It's sometimes called a quest a quest, this sort of adventure. And it was talking about bends in a river, but each time you get to a bend in the river, you stop and you think about your gender identity. Well, gender identity is a meaningless concept anyway. It's not scientifically supported that we have this thing. But it's a way to get teenagers to constantly be looking at themselves, looking at their motivations and analyzing their actions, which I think we can see, it will inevitably create

mental health issues. Inevitably. Yeah, well look, look, here's what it's analogous to. Okay, so imagine that there are twists and turns in the bends of the river of your marriage. And there are constant microchallenges and disputes that emerge in the course of the marriage. Okay, here's the new rule. Okay? Every time you encounter any doubt what's so ever in your life,

question the integrity of your marriage. Right, okay, so here's what happens to a depressed person. So, let's say you have a little bit of a dispute with your husband and it produces a little negative emotion and you think, oh my God, I'm always, I caused some trouble. That's the first thought. I caused some trouble. Here's the next thought. I've caused a lot of trouble in the past. Next thought. I caused a lot of trouble in the present and I'm likely to continue to cause a lot of trouble in the future. Okay. A person who causes a lot of trouble in the past, present, and future, they're really not a very good person. They're not really fit for a

marriage. They're probably not fit to live. I should commit suicide. Okay, so that's how a depressive person thinks. Now, think about how that works. So you go from a micro challenge, you have a little scrap with your wife, and then you take yourself apart, right down to the foundation, and the foundation in that case would be, do you even have the right to exist?

And so a depressive person has no defense against that cascade of doubt. Okay, so now imagine this is what we're doing to children. We know that children established the ability to distinguish between male and female, extremely early. They can do that as infants. They can likely do it as newborns. So that ability to distinguish between male and female is fundamental. The reason it's fundamental, obviously, is because if you can't distinguish between male and female, you're not going to reproduce. So now we know not only is that true biologically, but also conceptually, it seems the case that the distinction between masculine and feminine symbolically is a distinction that's at the bottom of our ability to perceive as such. We tend to make

gendered categories in the world almost automatically. So there might be no more fundamental perceptual category than sexual differentiation. It might be more fundamental than up or down, or darker light. It's at least in the same domain. So this is now what we're doing to teenagers when they're confused. We're saying, every time you manifest even a shred of doubt about anything, the first thing you should do is question the most fundamental element of your being, and you should do that continually.

And then it's even worse than that, even though that's really bad, because we're doing them to something like anxious depression by doing that. It's even worse than that, because, well, let's say, I've been reading about this, like, I think it's Demi boy identity. I've sort of, well, mostly, mostly you're a boy, but sometimes you feel that you're a girl. It's something like that, or maybe I have it backwards. I don't really give it down to tell you the truth. But here's the problem with that. It's like, let's say you have a non-standard gender identity. What the hell are other people supposed to do about that? What are the rules here?

Because if you're a woman, I kind of know how to treat you. I'm going to do it in a stereotyped way to begin with because I don't know who the hell you are. I'm going to use low-resolution approximations. Those are going to be stereotypes. There are no different than categories. Then when I get to know you, I'll particularize it. But if I don't know whether you're male or female, what the hell should I do with you?

You don't know, because you don't know what the rules are. And so the simplest thing for me to do is just not do anything with you. The simplest thing for me to do is go find someone else who's a hell of a lot less trouble, and who's willing to abide by the social norms enough so that they don't present a mass of indeterminate confusion on immediate confrontation.

And then, you know, the repost from the transgender side is, well, if you're a little more tolerant, you'd know how to give me what I want. It's like, I don't have a bloody clue how to give you what I want, what you want. I have no idea. I don't clue how to give you what I want, what you want. I have no idea. I don't know how to give me what I want. I can barely manage it with my wife.

I certainly have no idea what to give a bald man with a mustache in a red dress. I have no idea what to do with you. And neither do you. No one knows the rules. So we tell kids question your identity, specify your non-binary orientation. But then what? Like, what's the life path associated with that? How are you going to conduct yourself as an adult as someone who's non-binary? Are you going to get married? How are people going to treat you at work? What are you going to do with your kids? How are you going to address?

If you don't know the answer to any of those and neither does anyone else those aren't identities They're not identities. They're They're masses of ideological confusion and that's all an identity tells you Tells you and other people how to perceive and how to conduct yourself tells you and other people how to perceive and how to conduct yourself. And man and woman, boy, girl, male, female, are stable categories, their reality. And to teach children any different to that is to lie to children and to lie to teenagers. And it's the most distressing thing for me to observe this going on, that it's done in a name of

kindness, it's done in a name of passion, it's seen as the only legitimate way to help these kids and it's so cruel. I mean, I think you pointed out before, you're what you're doing is you're affirming, particularly a teenage, particularly a teenage girl self hatred and self rejection and absolute hatred and disgust about being female. You're affirming that and you're saying, yep, you're right to feel that way. You know, it's, um, you know, reject, let's kill off that person. And let's replace that that defective woman with a boy and we agree with you, the boy is so much better.

This is who you really are. So the lie there is like being a girl or a boy isn't who you are, it's what you are, it's just fact. You know, who you are is your personality, is your personality traits, what you do, whatever. Being a boy or girl isn't who you are. Personality is your personality traits, what you do, whatever. Being a boy or girl isn't who you are, but how it's sold to children

and it's sold to children at the earliest ages, I've counted about 40 picture books for prime years now, is that it uses the messages that are given to children now. So be who you are, be yourself, and the other, to know, who hasn't developed a self yet. And it's an all, you know, it's a lifetimes job, in my experience. But then also the other really strong messages, you know who you are, and nobody else has the right to question you. Now, this is indoctrination from the early years onwards.

So age three, as soon as children start kindergarten, these books exist. So what you're doing is you're taking away from that child or this generation of children, the stability of reality and the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality, at the most fundamental level of who they are. And the way in this sense that we're treated,

we're now the children and they're the adults, is part of this message that parents are given, your child is born whole with a fully formed sense of self. with a fully formed sense of self. And so, yeah, my four-year-old boy, he knows, or she knows who she is. You know, it's not up to us to question that, our child's wisdom. And, you know, the child is dependent on us,

as parents, our job, and we don't even see this as a job. It's just automatic. A child will say, look, mummy, there's a dog and we'll say, yes, it's a dog and we can't or that's a dog, no, darling, actually, it's a cat. We were constantly, constantly reinforced our growing child's sense of what's real and what's not and And we correct them if they make mistakes. And we don't see that as a job, it's just sort of automatically what we do with kids. But that's what we're doing. And in this case alone, we're saying, no, that's, you know, you are literally a girl. And we're approaching it as adults who are thinking, I am affirming

his gender identity. Not to the child you're not. You're telling that boy he's literally a girl. So for him, he doesn't maybe understand biological sex yet, but for him, he's biologically female. On the child's level of understanding, a trusted adult is telling him he's a girl. So he's a girl. Right in and providing.

And reason for his confusion. Yes, and all that. And all that's the terrible thing. Yeah, also the fact that he has faced disapproval, typically from the parents, from one or other, or both parents, and perhaps from a wider circle, for the toy choices he's making and his friendship. And so as soon as you say to him, he's a girl,

and we get these sort of short term honeymoon kind of results of, you know, in create, it was something he's really happy. Well, of course he is, because now all his toy choices are approved of by the adults. And of course, what he wants to do is win the approval of his parents. That's what he needs to do for his survival.

So you've got this terrible lie being told to children. And I think exactly the same with teenagers. Yes, they're developmentally later on. But it's exactly the same lie. And it addresses true, it teenagers specific vulnerabilities of identity formation. So there's no difference between being self-conscious and being miserable technically, but here's something else. Self-consciousness among females is much more associated with body dysmorphia. Now, there's a bunch of reasons for that.

We don't know all of them, but here's a couple. First of all, at puberty, women start to experience more negative emotion on average than men. And that's not true of boys and girls, but it does seem to kick in at puberty. And that's likely because you get size dimorphism developing. And so it's reasonable for women to be a little bit more timid about the physical environment than men, but also women are more sexually vulnerable.

And also, they have to care for infants. So being threat sensitive makes sense. OK, in any case, those are three possible reasons, but it definitely kicks in at puberty. Now, it also is the case that anxiety among women tends to take the form of bodily self-consciousness. And I think the reason for that, likely, this is a speculation,

although the other, the mere observation is a fact, it's likely because girls and women are judged more comprehensively on their physical appearance than men. So it makes sense that if they're going to be self-conscious, it's going to be more bodily-focused. And then that's particularly rough. Then the third contributing factor is girls hit puberty earlier than boys. So now what you have a perfect storm there, so now you have a girl and she's feeling a lot more anxious and confused than she did before because she hit puberty. Plus her body is doing 50 weird things. Plus she's getting all sorts of strange attention from adults

that she never got before. Plus she doesn't know how to fit in on the social front and she's trying to make that transition from childhood to adulthood. And so, and then, you have people additionally torturing about the fact that any deviation from the norm on the stereotypical front is actually an indication that she doesn't exist in the correct body. Well, she doesn't really feel like she's in the correct body to begin with. So, it's a perfect storm for young girls. Well, she doesn't really feel like she's in the correct body to begin with. So it's a perfect storm for young girls. When Canada came out with its compelled pronoun law 2016, I talked to the Canadian Senate and I said, you idiots and you're legislation, you think you're going to free up kids. You're going to produce a psychogenic epidemic among

young women because they're preferentially susceptible to psychogenic epidemics, which is why we had a bulimia epidemic and an anorexia epidemic, all of which was spread by social media and a cutting epidemic. And then there's a history of such epidemics going back 300 years. I mean, Freudian hysteria, which was very widespread in the Victorian times, although disappeared afterwards or mutated, was also a psychogenic epidemic that preferentially affected young women. And so, well, I just wanted to lay out some of the reasons why that's the case.

Higher levels of negative emotion and more bodily focused self-consciousness. And so then you add to that a kind of unpopularity because maybe a given girl isn't that sophisticated at manifesting what would you call it? Socially acceptable feminine traits. It takes a fair bit of sophistication to be a well put together woman and you're going to be pretty damn awkward at that if you're kind of a clunky tomboy when you're 12. And so while now you're providing them with, first of all, a unidimensional reason why they're miserable is pretty damn convenient and no wonder Adolescent wants that. It's like, do I have 50 problems? Or do I have one? Right. And then you also entice them with the additional social status that they're going to receive by now announcing that they're special and having

every bloody teacher in the entire world plus the world at large, focus on that narcissistic grandiosity that goes along with the insistence of the special identity. And the only price you have to pay is psychoso, the only price you have to pay is like enforced sterilization and surgical mutilation. Find deal for our teenagers. I think there are another couple of things about teenage girls that we don't pay as much attention to, but the very fact of physical development in teenage girls means your body is sort of ballooning, you know, breasts here, hips here, bottom there. And you lose that sort of gender neutral body that gave you so much freedom in childhood. And so what you, how girls experience puberty is moving from being a free kind of person

into being an object because suddenly her body is public property and as you say it's commented on. Everyone has a right to comment on it. She may, you know, she'll get comments in the street, she'll get she'll look all around her and become aware of the objectification of women throughout society. Now I think this is happening to boys much more over the past decade in a kind of, certainly a objectification of the male body. And in some cases, kind of sexual objectification of men.

And this generation I used to seeing those really exaggerated images of femininity. So the female heroes have huge breasts and tiny waist and big hips. Tim Kardashian. Yeah, and the male heroes, and you see, have a ripped with a six pack and their hulks. So you get that in gaming, you get it in, you know, it sort of programs like Love Island,

which I don't know whether you have in Canada. It's all about how you look. So it's happening more for men and interestingly, boys, experiences of things like anorexia having creased, but not as much as girls. So girls are in a real, you know, the gap is still widening. Well, there's the also, also the emphasis that that pressure also comes on women younger, not only do they hit puberty younger, but also, you know, on average, cross culturally, women prefer men who are four years older. And what that also means is that men prefer women

who are four years younger, and what, although most of that's driven by female female choice by the way, but not all of it. But it also means that women come under sexual pressure in some sense earlier than boys do, partly because of earlier onset of puberty, but also because there's a tighter relationship between biological fecundity and youth in women than there is in men. And so that piles on the additional pressure for young women. between biological fecundity and youth in women and there is in men. And so that piles on the additional pressure for young women.

So there's an overvaluation of female sexuality in some real sense that kicks in around the age of 13. And the advantage to that, I suppose, is all the attractiveness of youth and beauty. But the disadvantage is, well, there's a hell of a lot of competition and judgment that goes along with that particular contest. And certainly, that does pile on a 12-year-old girl. Well, with

overwhelming force, especially when you also add to that the fact that women are much more vulnerable on the sexual front in some real sense, because they pay a much bigger price for, well, for sexual misbehavior, let's say, than men do, given the risk of pregnancy. That's a good definition of what is a woman, by the way. A woman is the human being that bears disproportionate responsibility for reproduction. It's a good biological definition, too. And you're stuck with that, right? You encounter that face first when you hit puberty as a woman. And it's the constant. I think dilemma for women, individual women and for

feminism, how to put those two things together, because you're right, we have the biological responsibility that many that men don't have. And along with that, I think the disgust with the female body is quite, is pretty much tied into that because it kind of makes you an animal. And you're reduced to your biology. And so girls at puberty, apart from not being developmentally ready to face all of this sexual harassment. I mean, it's in schools now. There's there's a nepotemic of sexual harassment in schools. And not that girls should ever be ready to face that, but you know, they're so young and they can develop breasts at primary school, age 11. And suddenly they are supposed to be a woman when they are still emotionally a child. And how hard that is, but also going back

to the absolute female facts of menstruation. How disgusting is that? You know, that's the real issue here of developing sexually as female, you bleed. I mean, it's disgusting. It is horrendous for girls, you know, not all girls, you know, but it's one of the things I think that happens that pubic... I mean, one needs to challenge.

It's a challenge and it can be really embarrassing and humiliating, it can create anxiety and worry, it can create, you know create pain and feelings of real discomfort and all the associated physical effects that go with it, which boys don't experience. So boys will get taller and broader and it's kind of everything that they were before, just sort of gets bigger. But more, yeah exactly.

Where is with girls? Yeah, you change. It's suddenly, oh, I'm swelling out here and I'm swelling out here and my body's out of control. And if you've got an image of yourself as being intelligent, maybe even intellectual, bit different, all of those, you know, it can be so humiliating to feel actually, no, I'm just an animal, I'm just a piece of me. My body will go on doing this and I have no control over that to talk. That can be really frightening and it can be so all of this and what is awful now is that we don't look at girls, even though there's this massive 75% teenage girls going being referred to gender clinics, we don't look at them as teenage girls because of course that's transphobic. And this lack of a

differentiation between male and female means that they're all lumped together as trans kids and all of the issues are seen as the same. And we know in medicine that the female body and women are not, you know, looked at properly anyway, but this has really exacerbated that problem that we're not looking at gender dysphoria in girls, even to say that girls is transphobic, but we're not looking at it within a framework of female adolescent health,

and all of the other issues. That helps us move into a domain that maybe we can cover just as we bring this to a close. You've written a fair bit to about what I would characterize. I don't want to put words in your mouth as the absolutely pathological stampede of idiot, medical, and psychological professional organizations to insist upon gender-affirming therapy. So as a therapist, I'd like to point something out, which is the last thing I'm ever going to do for any of my clients to come when they come and see me is affirm their identity.

That is not my job. My job is to listen to my client and help them understand their current identity and developing in the direction that appears most appropriate as a consequence of the course of our discussions. So I presume people come to see me because they're miserable for one reason or another. I don't know why they're miserable. It might be terrible circumstances. It might be something they brought upon themselves. It might be some combination of both, but I certainly don't presume to know. And that's in some real sense that disturbance and identity. And then what the therapeutic realm is is a place to explore the vagaries of identity. Now, I'm not there to affirm my client's identity, nor to deny it.

I'm supposed to be there as a neutral ignorant listener. It's like you're complicated. I don't know who the hell you are, what's wrong with you. We're going to lay out a space of honest communication and try to develop a differentiated model of your identity and then try to optimize it. Now, then you get this insistence now that the professional colleges have brought in, which is no matter what your client tells you when you first encounter them,

you have to agree with that or your unprofessional to the point where your license can be reasonably, not only reasonably suspended, but shouldn't be ethically suspended. And I look at that and I think, oh well, the whole therapeutic and most of the medical nostalgia is just done. If I have an anorexic girl come in to me and say, I had an anorexic client once, very thin girl, as you might expect she wasn't very big. And I had her sit by me at one point. I said, look, you look at your thighs and now you look at mine and you tell me which one's bigger. She said that hers was and I said, okay, fair enough. So this is what we're going to do. I'm going to put a piece of paper under your thigh and I'm going to have you trace it. And then I'm going to

put it under my thigh and I'm going to do the same thing. And I want you to watch so you see I'm not playing any tricks. Okay? So we did that. Of course, my thighs were about that much bigger on both sides than hers. And I swear she looked at that piece of paper for 20 minutes. Now she trusted me by this point, hey? So she knew already that I wasn't playing tricks, but she still couldn't believe her eyes. And I think the reason for that is that I don't think that anorexic women can see their

body's property. They lose the ability to see the Gestalt, and they focus on a detail, and then they can't distinguish between what's fatty and what's bone, let's say. Literally they can't see it. And so, but I wouldn't, if an anorexic girl came into my office and said, you know, I feel that my thighs are too fat. I wouldn't say, well, if you feel that, you must be right. And it would be inappropriate and unethical of me to suggest otherwise.

I would say, well, maybe you want to explore that, maybe you don't. I don't know if you have any doubts about it. I don't know if this concern is causing you trouble I don't know if other people are reacting badly to your insistence that you're too fat still. Those are things we could discuss. I can't say no however you feel is right and certainly on the sexual identity front or the gender identity front exactly the same standards apply.

So there's even more fundamental categories than thinner fat. So I just think it's the death of the therapeutic enterprise altogether. So an unbelievable cowardice and lies on the part of the professional organizations. And it's presented as conversion therapy to do anything other than a firm, a child, self-diagnosis and self-prescription of treatment. And again, it ties into what's happening in parenting, whereas I think it's a good thing that we listen to children more now, because children weren't, you know, when I was growing up, children really weren't listened to at all. And that's good, but listening to a child seems to be interpreted as agreeing with the child on everything.

So, you know, a therapist job is to listen. There's a lot of listening in, you know, counseling or therapy, but it doesn't mean agreeing. And we, you know, so we give up our knowledge, our perspective, our knowledge of facts in order to placate or repeat or somehow in a misguided way thinking that we're building the self-esteem of the other person. But we don't, you know, that's never helpful. Certainly, you know, long-term, that's not a helpful thing to do. We could also point out and should, that all therapy is conversion therapy.

Right, the whole bloody point of the therapeutic process is transformation. Now, you could say, well, you shouldn't convert the client into a clone of the therapist's pre-suppositions, and that's definitely true. What you want to do, you know, when I saw my clients, the first thing I would try to find out is, okay, why are you suffering? How and why are you suffering? And that's really complicated. I could take hundreds of hours to figure out, because maybe it's a psychological quirk or maybe it's a catastrophe of situation and God only knows how to differentiate those. So you have to listen a bunch.

So the first is, well, how are you suffering and why? And then the next is, well, if you had your way and you could envision things being better, well, what would better mean for you and how would you envision that practically? And so that's on the client, right? You don't want to interfere with that because like you can offer your opinion, you can say how you've seen other people solve that problem. But you don't want to muck about with that too much because each person has to come up with a somewhat particularized solution to that problem. I don't know what your life would be like if you optimized it for you in your particular situation.

So, we have talked about that a lot, and then the third thing we do is talk about strategy. Now, we kind of know what the problem is. We have some sense of what might hypothetically be a solution. We could delineate out potential strategies for achieving it, but all that's predicated on discussion. And none of that has anything to do with affirmation, except I guess what you affirm as a therapist is you affirm the utility of honest communication,

and you affirm the idea that through honest communication and inquiry, positive conversion is possible, right? Conversion towards some more ideal state of being. Very difficult thing to manage, but you certainly don't do that by privileging your client's feelings above all else, and then by being terrified into silence with regards to the responses you might have to an inquiry. So it's really something to be hold. You talk about the role of compassion in that hypothetical compassion. One of the things I see continually, poor parents say, the people, the claim is being made constantly that unless you give way to your child's desired transition, they're they're

going to commit suicide. And would you rather have a trans child or a dead child? That's a question that's often asked to parents. Okay, so I want to take that apart for a minute. Number one, even the Bloody American Psychological Association, which has become a very pathological organization, admits in their documents of affirming care and they do this by pointing to prejudice. There are no good long-term follow-up studies on the life course history of trans individuals.

And then they say, well, that's because of prejudice against trans individuals. And be that as it may, I don't care about that at the moment. There are no long-term studies. So how the hell do you know that you're elevating or decreasing the suicide risk? And the answer is, you don't know. And that's a lie. And second, we know perfectly well that most of the kids, most people who manifest any form of psychopathology have a core set of symptoms, and those symptoms are basically elevated negative emotion, anxiety and pain, so anxiety and depression.

You don't have a mental illness except for maybe mania where anxiety and pain aren't part of it. Okay, so then the question is, if there is a risk for suicide associated with gender dysphoria, is it specific to the gender dysphoria or is it merely a consequence of the fact that all forms of psychopathology are associated with anxiety and depression, and suicidality is associated with anxiety and depression. And the answer is, unless you have compelling evidence that it's specific to gender dysphoria, then the appropriate thing to do scientifically is to assume that it's a consequence of anxiety and depression, and quit writing vulnerable parents with guilt. So, well, so for those of you who are watching and listening and are parents with guilt.

So, well, so for those of you who are watching and listening and struggling with these sorts of things, don't let idiot teachers and counselors tell you that by objecting to your child's gender dysphoria, you're elevating the risk of suicide because that is a lie. There is no evidence to support it, but the claim made is that your child is more likely to commit suicide if they are not affirmed and allowed to go into poverty blockers.

That's the claim. There's no evidence to support that at all. Parents can be supportive in lots of different ways, but parents are being bullied in the cruelest way, imaginable, to affirm their child and go on to this medical pathway. So the thing is now that not only parents, but all young people know that part of the persona, part of the rules of the tribe of being transgender, are having suicidal ideation. That's part of what makes you true trans. So it's the most irresponsible. I cannot understand why the Samaritans hasn't spoken out about it. Why government ministers have not spoken out about it. We know about the contagious

possibilities of this of suicide. We know the dangers of saying suicide is down to one factor. We know that and yet we let this carry on in this area and this is where you know this is the these are the kind people. Yeah well is okay. So let's close up with this. So I've been thinking recently that our conceptualizations of narcissism are two one-sided. I think we concentrate on grandiose narcissism, sort of more masculine form of narcissism, more than we concentrate on the more feminine form

of narcissism. And I think the female, form of narcissism, more than we concentrate on the more feminine form of narcissism. And I think the female, the feminine narcissism is something like narcissism of compassion. And that's associated with this idea, the Freudian idea of the Edible mother, who, what would you say, fosters a sense of hyperdependence, the helicopter parent.

Now, males can do that too, but it's more likely to occur on the female side because females are more agreeable and they are more compassionate. So the reason that we're, I think, part of the reason that no one is speaking out against that, while you are, and I have, and there's a few people who are, but the reason that you get slaughtered so badly if you do is because the narcissists of compassion come after you and they say, well, it isn't like you care for children.

You're just mean. We care for them so much that we'll listen to them no matter what we say. And then the underground message there isn't, we're doing best for children. The underground message is,'t, we're doing best for children. The underground message is, look how much we care. Don't we deserve to have our social status elevated,

merely on that grounds? And maybe right to the highest possible point. We're so compassionate that we're mother Mary herself, right? It's nothing but the mother of God's voice talking here. And so anybody who is antithetical to that, broad scale and all encompassing compassion is instantly what deemed an agent of Satan for all intents and purposes.

And but it's so absolute, like I saw this woman. So she was a Disney executive, and she was testifying if I remember correctly, when Florida was clamping down on Disney, and she said she was the head of their domestic programming, something like that. She said, well, I have a trans child, I don't know, pansexual child, one's five and one's seven and I thought, okay, let's just think about that statistically for like one tenth of a second. The probability that you have a trans child is one in 3,000 before the gender dysphoria epidemic hit.

One in 3,000. Okay, what's the chance that you have a pansexual child? Now, I have no idea what the hell pansexual means, but I know that whatever it is, it's a rarer than transsexual. So, at minimum, you have a one in 3,000 chance that you have a pansexual child. So, what's the probability that you have a pansexual child. So what's the probability that you have a pansexual and a transsexual child? And the answer is 1 in 9 million. So here's the question. Are you a pathological narcissist of compassion? Well, what are the odds? 899,999? No, no, it's 8,999,999 to one. That's the statistical, that's the appropriate

statistical analysis for that claim. So no, I don't think you have a trans child and a pansexual child. I think you are a devouring narcissist and you are willing to sacrifice your own children to your narcissistic pretension to evaluate you to what? Elevate yourself in the social hierarchy with no work merely by claiming that you're that loving. That's you. God, it's so awful. It's almost indescribable. And I think that's partly that there is enormous pressures on mothers to be kind and nice and to be ever nurturing, ever compassionate, ever kind. And that is the archetypal mother, the nurturer, the protector. The other side of that is pushing away, rejecting.

You can say it's the shadow side, but as young said, if you don't integrate the shadow side, it'll come up and bite you. And actually, if you look at other mammals, they bite their young, if they're trying to get hold of the teeth and drink milk, and the mother's annoyed and irritated and pushes them away or even bites them.

And we have to integrate that because it's all and make allowances in ourselves that part of our job is nurturing and holding close, but it's also pushing away or allowing the child to move away. And sometimes that needs a little push. And that is fine. Right. Well, in the psychoanalyst said, very wisely, I think this was Freud, but it might have been young. He said, the good mother necessarily fails. Right. So what you have, and this is very hard on women.

And I understand this. I really do. I watch my wife go through it. My wife is actually quite a disagreeable woman. So she had less trouble with this than a more compassionate woman would have had. This is not a criticism of my wife, by the way. So when a child's an infant, so zero to six months, you should be a hundred percent compassionate. Because the child is immobile and completely helpless. And the rule there is whatever you feel is 100% correct.

But then as the child starts to become mobile, maybe that kicks in, you know, essentially around nine months, the mother has to do this terribly difficult thing of starting to separate herself from the developing infant. And there is actually, there's a real sacrifice in that. And there really is the, I would say, the integration of the shadow side in that. Now, the proper way to handle that, the mature way to handle that is to think something like this,

if you're female, to think, look, I did my time, I sacrificed myself for this infant, that was entirely appropriate. But I should have a life of my own. I should pursue my own things. I should have a life of my own. I should pursue my own things. I should pursue my relationship with my husband. I should pursue my activities in the broader world. I should facilitate my child's independence

and I should model for that child independence. And that means that the appropriate thing to do now is to move away from that extraordinarily bonded mother-infant scenario to something that's more detached and focused on autonomy and competence rather than all compassionate love. That's, you know, the Freudians and the unions were very, very good at delineating out the shadow side of the devouring mother. The best book on that, I think, is The Great Mother by Eric Neumann, which is an absolutely

terrific book. Details out the symbolic representations of the devouring mother. And the devouring mother, interestingly, isn't the woman who pushes the baby away, or the infant away, let's say, and says, you know, go out and play. The devouring mother is the one that holds the child far too tightly in her loving embrace and will never let go. So, right, that's the shadow side of that hyper-compassion. And we're seeing that, you know, that,

we might be seeing that partly. I've never said this, I don't think. But it's only been 50 years since women have really been a force in the political world. And we could assume that there's going to be a feminine psychopathology that goes along with that, just like there's a masculine psychopathology on the male political side. And the male psychopathology might be narcissistic aggression, something like that. But the female psychopathology could easily be devouring compassion easily.

And I do think that's we're seeing that play out in our culture now. And God only knows what the consequence of that will be. I think that's what we're seeing in the gender identity movement. As women gain more power in academia, in politics, et cetera. You've got a combination of the sort of narcissistic entitled mail, which comes from the generally middle-aged cross dresses that you find in every organization and company and political party, these powerful men. And on the other hand, you get this over-emotional, illogical feeling-based kind of support

and from the women because this movement is supported so much by young women. And so you get the worst of the feminine, or the negative side of the feminine and the negative side of the masculine coming together, because I think the marriage of the two, I kind of naively thought, wouldn't it be great if the world was run by equally men and women, because that would balance the, you know, the in and the young and I don't believe that a world run by women would be more superior than a world run by man. But together, but what if the negative side of man and the negative side of women come together? And I think that's what we're seeing. And on that note, on that happy note. Okay. So for everyone watching and listening, I'm going to talk to Stephanie, and up for another half an hour

on the Daily Wire Plus platform, we're going to talk a little bit about how her interest in parenting and then her interest in the broader social, what would you call ramifications of attitudes towards parenting, how all of that developed, and I do that generally with my guests, something more biographical. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my Hello everyone, I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.