The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 362. Dark Parody and Villainous Clowns | Matt Walsh

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and political commentator Matt Walsh discuss his landmark documentary, “What Is A Woman?,” its inception and purpose, how the trans movement has distorted culture and endangered children, the realities of being mobbed, and how Matt continues to push the envelope with his ongoing endeavors. Matt Walsh is a popular writer, speaker, and one of the Right's most influential voices. He is the host of “The Matt Walsh Show,” and author of the best-selling children’s book Johnny the Walrus. His documentary “What is a Woman?” has become a cultural phenomenon and one of the most talked-about documentaries of 2022. - Links - For Matt Walsh: Twitter https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO01ytfzgXYy4glnPJm4PPQ WIAW (Movie) https://get.dailywire.com/wiaw/subscribe?utm_campaign=wiaw&utm_medium=paid&utm_source=googlesearch&utm_content=na_subscriptions&mid=g&cid=wiaw&xid=0&gclid=CjwKCAjwg-GjBhBnEiwAMUvNW1LEuwPRt13GyvlAg8GqWpKUP4VMY7lxMc5dO85uoHCabVWjIBHXkRoC41cQAvD_BwE WIAW (Book) https://www.amazon.com/What-Woman-Journey-Question-Generation/dp/1956007008 

Hello everyone! Today I'm speaking with wildly popular and equally infamous writer, speaker, documentarian and podcast host Matt Walsh. We discuss the early inception of Matt's hit documentary, What is a Woman? How dark parity can act as a means of social rebellion against tyranny, the villainous clowns grifting off narcissistic compassion, the abdication of ethics from healthcare and education professionals and the trauma suffered by children being deceived as well as those fighting for return to sanity. Hey, Matt, I'm looking forward to talking to you today. We're colleagues and we've met a couple of times, but we've never really had a chance to sit down and talk one-on-one at any great length. And so I'm looking forward to it today.

I got, we have a lot of shared experiences in common. I think and a lot of issues to discuss. First thing I'd like to know though, how are you doing? You know, we're doing pretty well. It's been last year, especially, has been quite a ride for me and my family as well. But it's been mostly positive talking about something, a message that resonates with people.

A lot of the blowback and everything that we've gotten is expected, and unfortunately, it comes with the territory these days. Yeah, well, let's start talking about the last year. Well, first of all, how many kids do you have? We just had our number five and six. So we had, we had, we just, we just had twins and we started with twins. So now we have six kids, two sets of twins

and then two individual kids. Oh, yeah, so you twins, that'll, that'll get you all in real quick. Yeah, it's kind of a nice bookend because you know, you start with twins and I think this is probably our endpoint. I know what you know, it's all God's will, but it's been yeah, it's been great. How old are your kids? They range an age from nine. The oldest twins are nine years old. They're about to turn 10 at the end of this month and then down to four months old. So we haven't hit the table.

Oh yeah, so you're pretty busy on the family front. Yeah, okay. And you got plenty to pre-occupy yourself in the social world. And things are going well for you with daily wire. They are. It's been the podcast that I do. My show has gained a lot of traction, especially over the last year. Not that it all started over the last year, but that's really,

when the film came out, that was another watershed moment in my career personally. So it's been fantastic. How many subscribers are you up to on YouTube? Well, we're at, oh, yeah, we're over two million. And I'm not sure what the exact number is, but then we got over two, yeah, over two million. And then, but then we got hit with the, with the demonetization. This was, you know, we were growing, we were growing rapidly and it kind of felt like, because we know how big tech works.

And it's just sort of, we were sort of expecting that we're growing too fast. And it's like, we're kind of sticking our head up above all the other weeds and they're gonna notice us and try to cut us back down to size, which is basically what they did with the demonetization. And are you still demonetized? Say it again. Are you still demonetized? Say it again.

Are you still demonetized? Yeah, the demonetization, I don't know exactly how it works, but they put you on some sort of probationary period where they demonetize you. And then if you have any more violations, then it's a permanent demonetization or they can kick you off the platform entirely. I mean, all these, I mean, you know, the rules for all these companies, but especially on YouTube, the rules are intentionally vague and very opaque. And so you're never sure, like they never told us exactly what I even said that was allegedly

in violation of the rules, but it was, we do know that it's all sort of in the vein of quote unquote misgendering. It all has to do with the tram. Oh quote unquote, misgendering. It all has to do with the trend. Oh yeah, misgendering. Yeah, yeah. Well, they demonetized my daughter, I think, for two years and we never had any idea why. They've left me alone, you know,

which is kind of strange because I've gone after the trans activists with, you know, Tongue and Hammer. As hard as I possibly could, I've probably said the harshest things I've ever said in public about anyone, about the trans activists, and yet let YouTube as it hasn't touched me. And so God only knows why that is. And like you said, the rules are vague and arbitrary.

And so, yeah, I think they realize that they can't, because I thought the same thing about myself up until this moment. I'd see other people get demonetized, suspended from all these platforms. And I think like, why haven't they gone after me yet? Because I'm certainly, I'm saying things that are least as, you know, quote, unquote offensive as them. I think it's just, they realize that they can't, if they try to just wipe out all conservatives or anybody on the right, they try to wipe them all out at once, that's not going to work for them. So they just kind of pick, it's like every year they have a new person that they pick to make an example of.

And so this year it was me, you know? Yeah, well, you know, on YouTube, I called for the liars and butchers who are pushing the Transurgery agenda and the counselors that are facilitating them to be imprisoned and you know, called them criminal. And so I could do that again. I think they're criminal and that they to be imprisoned and You know called them criminal and so I could do that again I think they're criminal and that they should be imprisoned and yet YouTube has pretty much decided not to pursue me, you know, and I suppose I'm guilty of dead naming people like Will Thomas as well and so

but and that's got me in trouble on Twitter, although that, and as you know, ended up working in my favor eventually. So let's talk about your documentary to begin with. What is a woman? And so that's caused all sorts of misery and grief around the world and made people happy as well to have someone finally come out and make what was essentially a kind of black comedy about this preposterous state of affairs that we happened to find herself in.

And so, tell us about the genesis of the idea and why you thought that was your problem. You know, people ask me, well, why does this trans thing bother you? Why do you care? Like, you know, what's it up? What's up with you? Why can't you just leave these poor people alone? And I mean, my answer to that is because they're cutting the musculature off the forearms of children to build penises that don't work. That's one of the reasons that I can't leave it alone. There's many others in which we can get to, but

in your situation, why did you decide to go after this particular topic? Why did it grip you? I think, well, the reason that you gave is a very good one. The fact that they're mutilating kids, like you really don't need, there are so many reasons why this issue matters and we ought to be engaged on it. But you don't actually need to go past the simple fact that they're mutilating and butchering and abusing kids. So that is one of the motivations for me on a personal level, the fact that I am a dad and I do have six kids, four kids at the time

when we started making the film. But the fact that my kids are inheriting this culture that has forgotten some of the most basic facts of reality is really distressed as me and troubles me. And I hear stories all the time, and I'm sure you hear these stories too, constantly from parents of usually, all kids are a little bit older than mine, adolescent kids, they go off to school, they come home and almost seemingly out of nowhere, the child is a new person,

has totally transformed for the worse. It doesn't, you know, maybe your daughter comes home, declares, oh, I'm a boy. And then I've heard these kinds of stories so many times and it's terrifying, it's harrowing. And so just on a personal level, I'm worried about my kids being in that kind of environment. But then also underneath all of that,

there's what this does to kids. There's the fact that opportunities are being taken away from women and women are being degraded by this and dehumanized by it and all of that appropriated their identity appropriate. All that is true, but what is underneath it, the underlying issue under all of that is that this is just an attack on truth itself. So the reason why I really care about it first and foremost is that it's not true. Like we're being, we are being told that we must accept something that is not true, that

we must go along with something that is not true. And, and I care about the truth, because if you don't care about the truth, then what's the point of anything? Like what's the point of anything that we're doing or saying or any of that, if we're willing to discard the truth. And when I first noticed this trans issue becoming kind of mainstream, which was probably around, you know, at a, it's hard to pinpoint a year, but 2014, 2015, around the time when Bruce Jenner declared himself Caitlin Jenner, it was crowned woman of the year. I think that was kind of the, that's not where all this started, but that was the moment, if there was one particular moment where it's surged into the mainstream. And I remember that quite vividly, and I also remember being distressed by the fact that so many people who I thought were on my side thought that this was kind of a side show distraction. They didn't think

it would go anywhere. They thought it was a fad. It wasn't important. There were a lot of conservatives who just went along with it because they were trying to be polite. And you know, conservatives do that a lot. They do. They do. And it's unfortunate because it's like, it's a, in some ways, it's a good impulse that you want to be polite. You have good intentions. You know, you don't want to be mean to somebody you want, you don't want to make them feel bad. And those good intentions are exploited to a great extent by the left. But that was what when I noticed people on the right completely dropping the ball on this subject or refusing to pick up the ball to begin with, like they didn't even want

to play this game at all. That's when I felt personally compelled to step up. And is that when you started to lay the groundwork for making the film? When did you actually start working on the film proper? It would have been about a year and a half before it came out. So it would have been in mid-2021. The groundwork for the film, though, was just this question, which obviously I didn't invent the question what is a woman? But it occurred to me...

Well, it's such a stupid question. I mean, the fact that we have to ask that question, you know, I was looking at this on the biological front. So sex is older than nervous systems by almost a billion years. That's how fundamental it is. It's probably more fundamental as a biological reality than up or down in terms of the stable phenomena that our nervous systems have actually adapted to. I think you could make a very strong case that there is no bit of reality that's more bedrock than sexual differentiation, not least because any organism that propagates

itself sexually, and that's pretty much any complex organism for all sorts of complicated reasons, if an organism can't tell the difference between its sex and the opposite sex, then it doesn't propagate. And so failure to propagate might constitute the most fundamental of category errors, right, in any biological sense. And so if you do believe that there's biological reality at all, which the hedonistic, narcissistic postmodern types like to deny, although good luck to them, you have to believe in the bedrock reality of sex. And overlay that notion of mutable gender on top of it is, well, it's quite the piece of slight of hand. We could talk about that a little bit because, you know, there are

men with feminine temperaments and women with masculine temperaments. That's within the realm of human variability. But that has virtually no bearing on the issue of biological sex. I told the bloody Senate here in Canada too, when Canada, which has gone woken away that put San Francisco to shame, I told them in no uncertain terms that they're going to produce the psychological epidemic. I knew the literature on psychological epidemics, which has been traced back about 300 years, not least by a man named Henry Ellen Berger who wrote a great book called The Discovery of the Unconscious.

Multiple personality disorder, for example, is cycled as a psychological epidemic for almost 300 years. There's been epidemics of cutting and bulimia and anorexia and Tourette's in very recent years. There was an epidemic of paranoia about satanic ritual daycare abuse back in the 80s, and that really got seriously out of hand. There's a great book on that topic called Satan Silence that was written by a lawyer and a social worker detailing out the absolute hysteria that emerged around the possibility that people were being children were being abused, you know, in these underground caverns, underneath towns by their daycare personnel. The FBI invented an entire new category of sex criminal, by the way, a category that

doesn't exist, which is late onset female serial sexual abuser, right? That doesn't exist. That doesn't happen. And so I knew that the possibility of psychological epidemic was real. And the best way to cause the psychological epidemic is to confuse young women in particular, because as a general rule, it's young women who are prone to psychological epidemics for whatever reason. Higher levels of negative emotion, I would say, and probably earlier onset of puberty and more dramatic transformation, all of that seems to tie together to make young women in particular,

more susceptible to psychological epidemics. But, you know, nonetheless, we've run, run down that road like mad. And now we have a psychological epidemic on our hands. And of course, what's happening on the ideological front is that all the people who deny that an epidemic is occurring say, no, no, we've just freed people to pursue their own identity. And now they don't have to be afraid of being who they are, which is of course, I can tell you partly why that's false, by the way. So about 20% thereabouts of young people now hypothetically identify as somewhere on the LGBT, et cetera, El spectrum. And, but there's no indication that their actual sexual behavior has changed.

You know, so if you look at the girls, for example, who identify as bisexual, and I suppose that's the most common of the identity transformations, there no more likely to have had a same sex partner than they were 25 years ago. That's pretty interesting, eh? Because you'd think that human sexual behavior might be mutable because of social pressure to some degree. And, you know, what you say about yourself, that's obviously more susceptible to psychological pressure than what you do. But you might expect that what you do would move a little bit but I haven't seen any evidence at all that actual sexual practice is among young people have changed except

that there's pretty compelling data to suggest that young people are actually having a lot less sex than they were say 20 years ago and that's reached epidemic proportions in places like Japan and South Korea and so proportions in places like Japan and South Korea. And so anyways, you know, that's what, these are all the fun things that happen when you start blurring the distinction between men and women and then of course confusing kids who are already hyper-confused because of where they are in their developmental progression. All right, so you started, you started lay in the groundwork for the movie. How did the vision take shape? Like, what did you think you were doing to begin with?

And how did that change as you pursued the topic? Well, I'll send it around this question. And by the way, just to say one other thing about this, about the rise in these LGBT identities and as you point out, I mean, they claim that, well, it's not a social contagion, right? It's these were, they were always there. It's just that they were hiding in the closet and they were free to come out.

Well, the point that I always like to make here is that, and it's a little morbid, I suppose. But, you know, keep in mind that what the left also tells us is that if we do not aggressively affirm people who identify as trans or really anyone in the LGBT, under the LGBT umbrella, if we don't aggressively and systematically affirm these people, then we're going to have suicides and they're going to kill themselves. Well, so what that should tell us then is that if you go back through history and according

to them, there were millions and millions, every year millions of trans people who were just not out in the open because they weren't being affirmed, well, then we should be able to them, there were millions and millions, every year millions of trans people who were just not out in the open because they weren't being affirmed. Well, then we should be able to see through history just a terrible epidemic of suicide, the world over, especially among kids, because they were all these. Especially among kids who would also claim in their suicide notes that the reason they killed themselves because they had an identity. That was cross-sexual that wasn't being affirmed. And that didn't happen.

And in fact, if any data I've ever looked at, childhood suicide in particular was pretty unheard of until recently. So this is a terrible epidemic and a recent one. So that's one of the points to make there. But in terms of the film, I think we wanted to structure it all around this really basic question of what is a woman because it occurred to me a couple of years before we started making

the film that this is, yeah, it's a very basic question, it's a very simple question. It's the kind of question we shouldn't have to ask. It's the sort of question that the answer is so obvious that some people struggle with it just because of that, because it's so innate that you don't stop to think about it. But the simplicity is that's where you find the beauty and the power and the question. Rather than making arguments at the other side, it's like you're giving the floor to them and you're saying, okay, here's, you're claiming this and this, well, tell me more about that. So when a man says, I identify as a woman, I can respond and say, well, you're not a woman

and here are my reasons. More powerful response is to say, oh, you're a woman, what do you mean by that? What do you mean you identify as a woman? What are you trying to say exactly? So that's all, all that question is really accomplishing is, it's just, it's really giving the floor back to the other side and saying explain to us what you mean by that. And they're not able to do it. And if you can demonstrate that they themselves can't explain their own ideas and their own claims, then it's pretty much over. There's nothing else to say. They've exposed their own ideas as a privilege. There's also something else that's stunningly immature and pathological about that whole problem. I'm deeply ashamed of my colleagues on the psychological front, especially clinical

psychologists who've been silent during this, because clinical psychology is actually a pretty rigorous discipline, at least at the high end. It was very difficult to obtain graduate training as a clinical psychologist to get into a research-oriented, bolder Colorado model clinical program. You had to be able to do scientific research and publish and become a clinical practitioner. Unlike medicine, like people think of physicians as scientists, but they're not. They don't publish. They don't analyze the scientific research. They don't know how to do statistics. They don't know how to read scientific papers. They're not scientists, whatever else they might be. But clinical psychologists

are scientists, and they were practitioners. and clinical psychologists also know not only know with a hundred percent certainty that subjectively defined identity that identity isn't subjectively defined. They're actually bound by their own code of ethics to reject subjective identification as a diagnostic, what would you say, certainty? So for example, I'm bound by my code of ethics, if you come to me with a claim even that you're depressed, to assess that depression using multiple different methods. They have to be qualitatively different methods. And I have to see that there's convergence across multiple methods before I can accept

your self, let's say, your self-identification, your subjective claim. And the reason that that's the case among psychologists is because we know that mere self-report, which is the technical term for it, isn't, you can rely on it if you have absolutely no other evidence, but it's incumbent upon you to try to gather other evidence. And so, if you're diagnosing someone, you can be hauled in front of your disciplinary committees for only relying on subjective self-report. But now, as a clinical psychologist, guided, let's say, by the American Psychological Association Ethical Guidelines, you have to transgress against one or other set of guidelines because you are compelled by the new guidelines and also by law in most state and provinces to accept subjective identification.

And yet, you're bound by the other set of ethical codes, not to, because you have to use multiple converging methods to diagnose. And so that's put clinicians in an impossible situation. You know, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't, and I can understand why they're silent, but they shouldn't be because the contradiction is obvious. And there's one other thing, too. So the notion that identity, I'm a woman, because I say I am, the idea that identity is self proclaimed is also utterly preposterous, and every psychologist who isn't a moron knows this. And the reason for that is that you have to negotiate your identity with other people.

In fact, the entire process of establishing a harmonious relationship with another person, whether it's a friend or a wife or husband, a child, a parent, a business colleague, a stranger on the street, every single interaction you have socially is a negotiation of your subjective identity. And if you're someone who says, I am exactly what I say I am, even though that can shift for a moment to moment. And you have to play along, even though you don't know the rules. First of all, if you're a child, you're the kind of child who's going to be unpopular

and psychologists should know that because Jean Piaget documented that extensively. And secondly, that's a form of psychopathology because it's narcissistic and psychopathic and self-centered to the point where there's no way you can establish a reasonable relationship with anyone. And all psychologists who aren't utterly incompetent know that, and yet are in the main 100% silent on this issue. And that's despite the fact that these kids, for example, are being lied to by extraordinarily badly trained psychotherapists and then butchered by while surgeons who are, you know, acting out a degree of self, what would you call self-centered greedy virtue signaling that I think is actually

unparalleled in the annals of medical malpractice. And that's something to say given that there were no shortage of physicians involved in the Nazi atrocities. So anyway, that's just a shout out to all my colleagues who are remaining silent. Well, all of this is transpiring on the public front. All right, so now you went out and you talked to a bunch of professionals, hey, academics and so forth. And you asked this question, what is a woman?

And your documentary is interesting because there's a serious element to it, because you're posing this question, but there's also a satirical and tongue and cheek element to it. And I didn't know what to make when I watched the documentary to begin with, because it had this kind of satirical edge, but I've come to realize more recently that almost everything that's happening in our culture has a satirical edge, and that's probably too true of authoritarian totalitarianism in general, you know? And I started to understand that that's why the figure of the evil clown is such a common trope and fiction is that when you get a totalitarian when you get a rise in totalitarian ideology

you get a Concovenant rise in what would you say the dominion of the evil clown and everything turns into a parody. And there was certainly an element of that in your film. You know, I mean, I was watching you interview professors and so forth and it's so preposterous that, well, it looked at times that you were having a difficult time believing that you were doing this or even sometimes keeping a straight face. And so what was that experience like?

Yeah, it's interesting too because our, the original movie, the way that I conceived it, would have been even more satirical. I think I originally thought of this as a fully satirical, almost in a certain way, playing a character almost as someone who's bought into this stuff and I'm getting these people to keep talking. And we kind of, as we began to film it, we started to see it differently,

where we needed, and so if you watch the movie, you can tell, it's like almost exactly halfway through. There's this kind of tonal shift as we get into the more, to the more serious conversations. And we had to have that there because some of this stuff that's happening is so horrifically evil that there's no way that I can see to make it funny or anything.

And we have to, we have to be willing to, to stare right into that darkness. But then I didn't want to lose the hysterical part of it either because it is also true. Although this stuff is, is horrifically evil, it's also absurd. It is completely absurd. And we have to point that out. And I think that's one of the first mistakes that we made when I say we, I mean, the people that, the team sanity, the people who know better. Well, the first mistakes we made was in thinking that what we, the last thing we can do is ridicule any of this because that's too mean. I know we need to ridicule it.

And it's not about ridiculing individual people who are confused or mentally ill or struggling. Ridiculing the idea, the notion, the claims that are being made. And if any individuals are being ridiculed, it's the people who know better and are out there propagating the stuff like, we talked to a doctor in the film and he's a proponent of this stuff and transiting the kids and she's involved in that. And the conversation devolves into this stuff about do chicken, does a chicken have a gender and can a male chicken lay eggs. It gets really, really absurd.

And she becomes kind of the butt of the joke, but it's that's her fault. It's because her own position is so ridiculous that it gets exposed that way. You know, I'm dubious about one of the claims that you just made. And I think maybe this has to do again with the intrinsic politeness of conservatives. And by the way, politeness technically is an element of agreeableness on the personality temperament front. And politeness is a predictor of conservative belief. And so the idea that conservatives polite actually turns out to be technically true.

I actually believe that a fair number of the individuals who are involved in this actually deserve to be called out and satirized and actually punished for their actions. And so as you may know, or may remember, I got kicked off of Twitter because I went after Elliott Page. And I went after Elliott Page, who I actually have a fair bit of sympathy for, as an individual, because my sense is that Ellen Page

wasn't never found love in a manner that enabled her to fully appreciate what she was as a woman. And I don't know why that happened or why she wasn't unable to deliver that to herself, but as a clinician, I have a fair bit of sympathy for that because it's pretty damn awful to be so at odds with yourself that the solution to your misery is mutilation. And then I went after her on Twitter talking about the criminal physician that cut off her breasts and the sin of pride, and that's why I got kicked off Twitter. And I got a lot of grief about that from friends and from the general public and from my own licensing board, which is

trying to remove my license in Ontario at the moment, although they're not having a lot of luck with that. And I'll know a small part because of that tweet because I miss what do they call that dead named Elliot page by using her name Ellen, which is her name. And the reason I went after her is because she paraded her new chest in a fashion magazine and got 1.5 million Instagram likes. And she's a star and has a fair bit of influence and She's a model because that's what a star is a star is a model for emulation and em an imitation for emulation and imitation and admiration and she

misused that position to advertise this mutilation and to contribute to the and to contribute to the misery of foolish young women who are misguided, who are doing things to themselves that will be atrocious and permanent. And so I felt she had crossed the line from victim to perpetrator and deserved a fair bit of trouble for her foolishness. And then I also think the same about Will Thomas and Dylan Mulvaney. And I think as individuals, they deserve a fair bit of negative public attention, no shortage of satire. But I look at Will Thomas, I talk to Riley Gaines, I release podcast with Riley Gaines, the swimmer who, one of the swimmers who was forced, compelled, and chose to swim against Will Thomas, this six foot four, you know, man with three foot shoulders who was crushing the women in all sorts of different subdivisions of swimming championships. And you know, he's, he is so bent

that it's almost incomprehensible from a psychological perspective. I mean, you think about what you have to be like, to be a sick, so-it-for-man who was competing among other men who wasn't doing that great a job of it at a profession level. I think he was ranked 460 second, who then decided he was a woman, even though he only took vague and tentative steps in that direction, and then competed against women, and then took their trophies, and then paraded himself as a hero among victims, and a grand heismself narcissistically, while he was stealing from these women, who were obviously his physical infuriars on the swimming front, well, parading his victory in front of them and then also assuming that he was some sort of victor in hero. Like, you're so far gone at that point that you deserve a certain amount of,

what would you say? You're kind of out of the realm of sympathy as far as I'm concerned. You've pretty much put yourself firmly in the camp of perpetrator at that point. And I think the same thing about Dylan Mulvaney. I watched Dylan Mulvaney's videos. When I first saw him, I thought, man, this guy is definitely, he's a comedian. Like Mulvaney is obviously a born actor and has been on stage. And this is technically true since he was very young. He's actually pretty damn funny, like as a, as a someone who can parody women, he's pretty funny. But to take that joke seriously and to undergo the surgical transformations and to put himself forward as a hero to victims. Like, sorry, buddy, you've crossed the line. You're, there isn't, there is, in fact, at that point,

I think that sympathy and compassion actually start to become vices rather than virtues. So, I don't know what you think. What do you think about that? I mean, you know, you just made a case that we should be sympathetic towards the individuals, but skeptical towards the ideas. And I'm thinking, yeah, most of the time that's probably true. But yeah, I have no, well, I certainly don't disagree with you at all

on that. I, you're not going to get the, the, the, the, uh, oh, an abundance of sympathy has never been, has never been my, one of my weaknesses, although I have many. Um, I, I totally agree with the distinction that you're drawing. I think that the people who are actually promoting this stuff, propagating it, intentionally confusing other people, recruiting kids into it, Dilma Vainey went to the White House and was promoting gender mutilation of kids. So the people who are promoting it deserve scrutiny, mockery, criticism. I mean, it is almost this stuff is so evil that in my mind, there's very little you could

say about the people promoting it that I would think goes too far personally. But this is pretty rough given that it was also Kamala Harris, right? Because she sent him a letter of commendation, Mavani, and Cold of Mahero. Right? So it's not just fringe people on the outskirts, let's say like Mavani or even arguably Will Thomas. It's people who are at the pinnacle of political power, like Kamala Harris, who are also promoting this. Exactly. Exactly. For me, the sympathy goes to the people, the kids in particular, who are caught up in this through no fault of their own, and then become desperately confused in a way that I think any of us at a certain stage in life could have been susceptible to.

I mean, it's impossible to know, but like if I had been born into a culture and into a family God forbid, where these ideas were accepted and promoted. And I had been told almost from birth that I could be a girl if I choose to be and that, you know, if I ever, if I find the color pink appealing or if I ever play with my sister's Barbie dolls or something, that means I'm a girl. If I had been told that stuff from birth and I'd been in this kind of environment that these kids are in, who knows where I would end up, who knows where any of us would end up right now. And so those are the victims, you know, and of course the victims of this stuff get our sympathy. But because we sympathize with the

victims and we care about the victims, we love the victims, that means that we are all the more angry at the people who are victimizing them. And it might be true that many of the victimizers were victims themselves at one point in the past, you know? And that's true of anything. Like you find a serial killer, you're probably going to find out that he was abused as a child. But, you know, and that's a terrible thing. But the moment that you decide to become a victimizer, the moment that you cross that line from victimized to victimizer, now that's where you are. and that's how you get treated. And I think that's the case with a lot of these people.

I think that's right too. Well, and there's plenty of people who are terribly abused as children who don't grow up to be abusive. In fact, the vast majority of the is the case, right? Most people learn to not abuse, even if they're abused, even though most people who abuse were abused as children. Otherwise, it would just spread through the population in a few generations, right? Because

what would spread, obviously, if it was, if it, if it's spread, then it would spread. And so it doesn't spread. It tends to be, that's very interesting, you know, because it means most people draw the conclusion from being victimized, that victimizing is a bad idea. And so, and thank God for that. And I think that's one of the pieces of evidence that people are essentially good, even though they're strongly tempted to evil. So now you went out and you talked all these educated people. You went into universities, for example, and you talked to people who were utterly possessed by whatever the hell this ideology is. And so what did that do to you? I mean, you had some sense of what this was like to begin with and how widespread it was

in the culture. But then you went out and you talked to, I don't know, how many people and put them on the spot. And they came up with the most preposterous explanations or pseudo explanations. What did, how did that change the way you were looking at the culture? It was quite disturbing. We obviously knew this was an issue. We knew it was a problem. We wouldn't have set out to make the movie. But to me, going to a college professor, one of these trans doctors, we sort of knew what we were going to get out of that. It was still

quite difficult to sit across the room from someone who mutilates people for a living and just sit and listen to them, especially given that we decided early on that the point of this movie is not for me to go out and yell at these people and argue with them. As therapeutic as that would have been for me, it would not have made, I don't think, as effective of a film. So what that meant in practice is that like I'm sitting there for an hour or more, mostly just listening to them say all this stuff.

And there are many arguments I want to make in response. And for the most part, I didn't because that's not what the movie was. We wanted to let, we wanted to let sort of gender ideology hang itself by its own words rather than by arguments that I make. But so that was pretty depressing and that could get kind of dark. The more depressing thing for me and what was actually a surprise to me is when we went to all these different cities and we went out on the street and we did mail on the street interviews, just talking to regular people about these issues and asking them if they can

define the word woman and all this. And I really thought going into it that we would be able to predict before we talk to somebody what kind of answer they're gonna get. And I thought that we would talk to a lot of confused, younger, you know, Gen Z types, and we get the typical stuff from them.

But then if we pull aside some older guy, you know, with his wife and they're walking down and we start talking to them, I thought we would get just plain common sense. And we didn't. We found that the vast majority of people we talked to no matter their demographics, they were basically saying the same kinds of things that we heard from the college professors, only they didn't know that that's where they got it from.

So they didn't even know, it was clear to me that they didn't know exactly what they were saying or why they were saying it, but they had a party line that they were repeating. You probably made a postmodern mistake in your assumptions. Your mistake, I would say, in that initial assumption was that common sense was semantic, that it was coded in explanation, that people know what a woman is

because they can say what a woman is because they can say what a woman is and they can define it. And that's how they derive their knowledge. And I don't think that's the case at all. And I actually think you know it isn't the case because you said that, you know, knowing what a woman is is so obvious that you don't need to be able to articulate it. And most of the fundamental bedrock assumptions of our culture are actually beyond verbalization. They're the non-verbal axioms of the set of semantic knowledge.

And so then when you go talk to someone who's a normal ordinary person, and you ask them something preposterous, like, defend marriage, they have no idea what to say because they're not married because they had a lengthy philosophical justification for being married. They're married because we decided as a species seven million years ago that we were going to become heterosexualy monogamous in the main, and that's our nature and our customs. And that isn't coded primarily semantically. And so what happens when you put people on the spot is that you reveal not exactly their confusion, but the lack of their ability as philosophers. People don't get married because they know why marriage is a good thing in the way that someone like John Locke or John Stuart Mill or some great philosopher might be able to elaborate.

They get married for the same reason they put up a Christmas tree. As you can ask someone, why do you put up a Christmas tree? They have no bloody idea why they put up a Christmas tree. As you can ask someone, why do you put up a Christmas tree? They have no bloody idea why they put up a Christmas tree, like what the meaning is. They do it because everybody does it. It's part of the shared set of nonverbal assumptions in the culture. And so you tapped into a semantic confusion, right? And that certainly preyed upon by the intellectual types who should know better. So anyways.

Yeah, I think there was certainly an element of that. Although it was interesting, when we went over to Kenya and talked to traditional tribes there, there was not that same conveyor—it took them a minute to understand what we were actually asking because it is so obvious that when we first asked the question, they thought they thought I must be asking something else because that couldn't possibly be asking that. What's interesting with the question was they had no trouble talking about it in detail and being very clear about it. I think that back in the United States, there was some confusion about being put on the spot to explain something that's so innately understood.

But then there was also what seemed to me to be an awareness among many of these people that this is a loaded question now, and they can't really talk about it and be honest. In fact, we heard about that. There are many people we talked to aren't in the film because they didn't want to be on camera. They refused to be on camera and they would tell us like, I can't talk about this with a camera rolling because it's my job because I'm going to school because this and that. So there's a real fear that people have that prevades through this whole conversation. And I like to think that over the last year, some of that fear has dissipated a little bit,

not completely, but it just seems to me that people are normal, people are more open about just saying what's clearly true when it comes to issues surrounding gender. But at the time, we made the film, it was just everywhere, and it was really difficult to get anybody to want to have this conversation at all. Yeah, well, I think the seeds of semantic confusion have been so deeply and a fair bit of that

is attributable to the leakage of post-modern slash neo-Marxist ideas from the academy through the media into the broader culture. So you were definitely picking up on some of that when you were interviewing people. And it's not surprising as well that people are afraid, because, well, this is something we can talk about, too, you can pay a big price for being mobbed. And I know a lot of people who've been mobbed. I probably talk to 200 people who've been effectively mobbed. And some pretty high profile people like Jay Bada Cheria, for example, and Jonathan Height, and many, many others,

many professors I know, and public figures. And typically, my experience has been, I've been mobbed lots of times, and it hasn't been particularly pleasant. My observation of people is that when they're mob, they respond to it with about the same degree of catastrophic intensity that you might experience if you were subject to a very, very long, grueling, arduous, and intimidating lawsuit,

or a serious illness on your behalf or the behalf of someone that you love. I mean, Jay Bada Cheri, at Stanford, you know, he got mobbed by his colleagues and canceled because he dared to say what he knew about the pandemic lockdown. And he lost 35 pounds in three months, you know, and I know lots of people who were bullied into, you know, near nervous breakdown or physical illness as a consequence of being isolated and mobbed. And so it's not surprising that people are afraid. Now, there's something to be afraid of, to be mobbed.

No, no, you tell me how you've coped with that. I mean, you're, you know, you're sort of nefarious poster boy for the radical leftist activists. And you have been canceled on YouTube and your reputation salvaged in all sorts of ways. You're fortunate because you're with the Daily Wire Plus and you have a group of colleagues that stand behind you. And so, you know, that's very different than someone

who finds himself stripped bare of all his collegial support at the university. But what's it been like being on the receiving end of that? Well, you said it's not pleasant. You know, I think you're right, that it's definitely not pleasant. I do have, I always give my advantages that you highlight that for one thing, I can't, I can't, they can't cancel me at my job. It's just not going to happen. Especially, especially with the methods that they choose by accusing me of being a transphobic, big, whatever, it's not gonna land. And so I have that security, which is really important.

Also, just some other, I've been hacked, I've been all these different things, the docs, all the rest of it. And we have some resources to deal with some of that. But I still had to get 24-hour armed security at my house. I think people maybe don't realize that it's never fun. It's always unpleasant when you have the mob coming after you. Not all mobs are made equal though.

And some mobs are much more vicious and more personal and more willing to do pretty much anything to destroy you. Yeah, I agree with you, by the way. Yeah, I think that's right. They've been told and they believe that your lack of affirmation is a physical threat to them. So therefore anything they do to you is really just self-defense. And it's completely...

Well, you know, that's... It's always the case. I did some in-depth studies with a colleague of mine, a student of mine, Maya Jikic. And she had toured mass grave sites with the UN before she came to be a student of mine, very brilliant girl. And we were looking into the precursors of genocide in societies around the world. And one of the precursors to that kind of extreme violence is that enhanced sense of victimization is that genocides occur when you get them before they get you and you get them before they get you because they're

coming for you. And so the populist types who want to capitalize on genocidal impulse, heighten that sense of victimization. You know, when you talked about this unbelievably pathological claim that counselors often make now much to their eternal shame, I would say, and absolute an evidence of their absolutely unprofessional and unwarranted conduct when they tell parents, for example, well, would you rather have a trans child or a dead child? And the evidence on that front, by the way, to call it thin is to say almost nothing.

I mean, the kids who suffer from gender dysphoria, from bodily dysmorphia, let's say, are at higher risk for suicide. But the reason they're at higher risk for suicide actually isn't because of their gender dysphoria or their body dysmorphia. They're at higher risk for suicide is because both of those clinical phenomena are offshoots of an underlying proclivity for depression and anxiety, like a non-specific proclivity for heightened negative emotion. And that's associated broadly with suicidality. Now what happens in the case of a psychogenic epidemic is that that underlying proclivity

for negative emotion, that's trait neuroticism, by the way, and that's one of its variants, searches for a culturally appropriate form of expression. And that can be modified radically by the culture. And so you see it taking all sorts of different forms and different cultures, but the underlying proclivity is the same. And to attribute the proclivity for suicide to the specific, say, body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria is an absolute misreading of the clinical literature.

And plus, there is no evidence that the early hormonal transition and surgical transformation of children decreases the risk for suicide. Like that's just an outright lie. In fact, the American Psychological Association itself, in their position paper on gender affirming care state. It's so funny. They're so pathetic.

On one page, they claim that if you don't affirm gender identity, which means lie to children about which sex they are, then you increase the risk of suicide in the long run. And then like three pages later, they say, because of the prejudice of the research community, there are really no valid long-term outcome studies on the consequences of gender transformation surgery. It's like, well, you can have one of those guys, but you don't get to have both. If there's no long-term follow-up studies because the research community is prejudice, and you know what, the clinical research community is not prejudice, their whole bloody enterprise

is to do long-term research on various psychopathological conditions. You know, they're not only are they not prejudice on the research front of the exact opposite of that, but there isn't, there are no long-term follow-up studies because it's a relatively new phenomena. If there's no long-term follow-up studies, you don't know of suicide risk as decreased or increased. Now, I would say the broader research indicates, well, you're not going to decrease suicide risk among depressed young people by subjecting them to radical and unwarranted experimental surgery that produces endless

numbers of side effects and turns them into the kind of person who has no stable identity whatsoever or any hope of establishing one. So yeah, I think, I think, right. Yeah, common sense. This is one of those things. establishing one. So yeah, I think, right, yeah, common sense. This is one of those things. Why I, on this topic and so many others, I tend to be, I guess I have an unscientific

view. What you might consider unscientific view of studies in general, I'm sort of skeptical. At least the way people use studies these days, which is really they just Google whatever conclusion they've already arrived at and they find a study that based on a skimming reading of it affirms that. And they say, look, studies have proven. I think common sense is we can often use first and foremost in these sorts of situations. And so it doesn't make any sense that we would be staving off suicide and giving kids better, long-term benefits by having them forfeit parts of themselves that they don't even understand yet. Before you even get to the

surgery, when they're on the cross-ex hormones to begin with, now these kids are sterilized. And so they're never going to be able to have kids of their own. And how could you, at 14 or 15 years old, make that kind of choice? No 14 or 15 year olds thinking about having kids. When I was 24 years old, I couldn't imagine having kids, and I didn't really want to have kids. A year later, I was married. Now I have six kids, and I couldn't be happier that I have them.

So when you're young, whatever declarations you make about what you want the rest of your life to look like, it's almost meaningless. And so when a 14 year old says, oh, yes, that's fine. I'll be sterilized. I'll be this. I'll have the breast chopped off and I'll be happy like that for the rest of my life. Anyone who's been around adolescentscence, anyone who's been in adolescence knows that that makes no sense. But the real problem is with, go ahead.

Well, it's also the case is that in principle, you're taking an unstable identity. So that's the gender-disforic identity, and you're transforming it into a stable and functional identity. And that's the new transgender identity. But it's not stable or functional. And the reason it's not functional is because, well, how the hell are other people supposed to integrate you into their communities and their lives? So for example, Chloe Cole, who's a prominent detransitionerer who's suing Kaiser Permanente and a variety of other medical practitioners for the butchery that they performed upon her when she was

very young, with no clinical assessment to speak of at all. And I know that because I interviewed her to find out how she was assessed and to call it appalling is to say virtually nothing. She couldn't find anybody to date her in high school, you know, once she had transitioned and The reason for that's obvious. I mean, it's hard enough for kids to find anybody to date in high school Lots of kids don't find anybody even if they're you know, so-called normal kids It's not like people are masters of dating when they're in high school And then of course if you're trying to establish a relationship with someone who was a girl

and who is now sort of a boy, you have no idea how to conduct yourself. And if you have any sense at all, you're just not gonna go there. And besides, you're gonna be afraid to go there anyways. And that isn't a consequence of anti-trans prejudice on the part of young people. That's utter foolishness. It's just that it adds a level of insane complexity to a situation that's already too complex for most people to manage. And so what happened to her was

that she ended up dating the sexual predators she found online. Because there are the only ones who got the right kind of kick out of exploiting someone in her unfortunate situation. You know, and you can blame that if you want, if you want to bend your activism to the ultimate degree and the prejudice that people have on the trans front in our broader society. But the truth of the matter is, the blatant and blunt truth is that we have enough trouble getting along with each other when it's men trying to get along with women, let alone when it's people who are sort of men and may be partly women trying to get along with other people who are maybe men and sort of partly women.

No one knows how to do that and no one will ever know how to do that. We know that people, you know, beauty is something that is, we perceive things as beautiful if they are true to their form and their whole and complete, you know, and healthy. Like these are things we associate with beauty. But when you mutilate and desecrate something, that's not beautiful. Like anyone can look at a beach, a pristine beach, and everyone thinks it's beautiful, every single person, but you covered in trash and all the rest of it, and nobody thinks that that improves it.

And so obviously, you're not going to improve somebody's body by mutilating it and desecrating it and removing the parts of it that make the person who they are. Well, Matt, you know you can improve women's swim record times by just letting men who say they're women compete. So, you know, there's an example of improvement if you really want one. You know, you might think that's not a genuine improvement, I suppose, if you had any sense, but all right, so now let's talk about the political end of this. Now, there have been, and I think your documentary is probably instrumental in motivating this,

as you said, I think one of the things you did effectively, and congratulations on that front, by the way, is get the public conversation going in a way that it hadn't been going and give people who knew that their common sense was appropriate, the courage to speak. And so now we've seen legislation emerge in many places, not least in Tennessee, making it much more difficult to run children down the hormonal

treatment and surgical transformation route. And so what do you think about the role you played in that? And what do you think about the ethics? Maybe of the distinction between political commentator, sort of detached political commentator and journalist and activist. Yeah, I think, well, I like to think that the film and some of the other work that we've done has played, you know, we're not the only ones working on this obviously, but I like to think that we've played a role, you know, a significant role in the political changes as well as the cultural

changes I mentioned earlier, just the fact that it, from my vantage point, people seem more willing to speak out and respond appropriately to some of these things. What we saw with Bud Light, for example, yeah, if Bud Light had done the exact same thing two years ago, I think they would have been okay. I don't think there would have been this massive boycott, but the fact that there is, and now they're reeling because they endorse trans ideology and their customers want nothing to do with it, I think that's a sign of cultural progress in the right direction. And on the political end of it, on the political end of it as well. I mean, it's not, it's nowhere near a complete.

And I think that at a certain point, for me protecting kids from this is the entry point. It's the first thing we should do because they are the least able to protect themselves. And as a society, it's our recalled by God to protect our children. But as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't end there. I mean, even if we could, even if they passed a federal law, you know, kind of the final thing on the political end when it comes to kid transitioning would be 2024. If there's a change of the guard in

DC, now we start talking about federal bans on child castration and mutilation across the country. And I don't know if that's going to happen or not. Let's just say that it did. I don't think that that is the end of the conversation at all when it comes to this. Because I also think that adults are victims as well. I don't think that think that adults are victims as well. Like I don't think that doctors should be able to do this to anyone, especially not kids. Okay, and so what, okay, so let, let, you know, I'm inclined to agree with you on that front,

but I wanna push back, we might as well talk about this. What do you think of breast enhancement? You know what I mean? There's these plastic surgical transformations right that do have to do with sexual identity and you know perfectly well that the devil's in the details here. Where do you draw the line? Like the libertarian part of me and I suspect you probably feel this way in some ways is that adults can go to hell in a hand basket in whatever way they choose. can go to hell in a hand basket in whatever way they choose. Now, I do question the medical ethics, for example, of castrating a man who decides that his true identity is unique, which is now,

apparently, although extraordinarily rare, at least for now, a thing. It isn't obvious to me that medical professionals should have that, right? But it also isn't obvious to me that medical professionals should have that, right? But it also isn't obvious to me how you precisely legislate on that front given the difficulty of drawing a clean line between what people are allowed to do to their bodies and what they're not. So tell me how you've wrestled with that. Yeah, I think, and it would be, you'd have to draw some distinctions and you'd end up with maybe some harder cases than what you have with kids because with kids, it should

be pretty simple. They can't consent to this, leave them alone. Theoretically adults can, so that's what makes it slightly more complicated. But I would, I think that there are some clear distinctions that we can note right off the bat. So, for example, breast enhancement, the idea is you're enhancing something that you already have. Whether you're enhancing it for the better or the worse, this is like a question of taste,

I suppose. Personally, morally, I would not want most forms of plastic surgery, unless we're talking about, you know, reconstructive, you're just figured from a fire or something like that. But I do think that there's a real distinction between plastic surgery, which is meant to enhance body parts that you already possess, and plastic surgery that is meant to remove healthy body parts or create a body part that you don't possess and could never possess. So, you know, a difference between a breast enhancement

for a woman and a fellow plastic for a woman where you're creating a fake penis. So, I think that there's a clear distinction there, and then also, too, I would argue that the fact that somebody wants a fake penis, the fact that somebody wants to have their skin on their arm desleeved and crafted into a penis, the fact that somebody wants to have their healthy body parts removed is evidence, all the evidence you need to begin with, this person is mentally unwell and they

do need help, but it's not that kind of help. They need psychological counseling. Well, they certainly bloody well needed first. I mean, that's the problem with the gender-affirming laws is that we're inclined, we're compelled now as therapists to leap to the most extreme conclusion immediately, rather than at minimum progressing through the ranks. I mean, because as an ethical psychotherapist, and certainly that's also the case for surgeons, your rule of thumb would be minimal necessary intervention. And maybe there are extreme cases where, and I think the dangers in this

outweigh the benefits, but we could say for the sake of argument that there are extreme cases where the surgical route to body modification is the right treatment for someone who truly feels that they're whatever the hell being born in the wrong body means. But you certainly don't start there. You start with the assumption that, well, you know, most people seem to adapt more or less to their bodies despite having significant problems with the imperfection thereof. And you shouldn't jump to the surgical route unless every other bloody option has been thoroughly exhausted probably over a multi-year period. Yeah, I mean, I would, I can't foresee any scenario where I would, where I would think

it was okay to do this to someone, no matter if they're, you know, no matter their age. For the same reason that, I can't think of any scenario where it would be acceptable to, and I'm trying to remember the name, body integrity disorder, okay? When somebody, yes, somebody feels like they shouldn't have a limb or they should be blind. Yeah, there might be someone who's very, very, very disturbed and they're practically suicidal

over the fact that they have legs. And so maybe you would think, well, this is one of those cases where if we don't do it, they're going to kill themselves. But I just don't, that's a line you don't cross. I mean, if it's to come down to that, that's someone who needs to be admitted into a mental asylum, you know? If that's the only other option you have, but there's just no scenario where you actually start removing the healthy body parts from someone

because they are that desperately confused. I just think that you can't. Right. So you basically think that the right to perform sex transition surgery should be permanently removed from the domain of what physicians are allowed to offer a service. Exactly. I mean, I'm inclined to agree with that. And you're, and I think that's right. If, yeah. That's an important distinction is that we're removing the right from the physician. So this is not usually when this comes up, I hear from people saying, well, adults should be able to do what they want to do.

And first of all, I don't, that's of course absurd. Adults shouldn't be able to do literally anything. But we're not even really, we're not even talking about what these, what the patients are allowed to do. We're talking about what doctors are allowed to do to them while charging them money for it. And of course, we don't let doctors just do whatever they want or whatever a patient says that they want. And so I think it's a distinction and it's a restriction that

should be placed on the medical field that you are called to treat and heal ailments. And the fact that someone is a man and wishes that he's not a man, well, there's no ailment with his body, the ailment that is in his mind. So that's where all the treatment should be directed, always. So now Michael Knowles recently got in trouble for some words he uttered in relationship to eradication and that spilled over to some degree into your domain. Do you wanna walk us through that particular brew?

Haha. Yeah, yeah, he, yeah, he, he, of course, it was, it was the left. And I think it started, it usually starts with media matters. I'm not sure who started it this time, but someone pulled the clip from his, I think it was a CPAC speech where he said that we, I believe his exact words are, we need to kind of a similar message to what I was just talking about. Yes, we want to protect the kids. That's our first goal, but it doesn't end there.

Trans ideology itself, we have to defeat. And so we want to eradicate trans ideology from public life. And so it's the ideology that we're attacking. And of course, people interpret that, I think, in a willfully ignorant way. They interpret that as, well, we want to kill trans people, which of course is completely absurd. And especially because the first victims of trans ideology are the trans, the trans identified people themselves. They're the first ones who are victimized by it. So we, for their own sake, first and foremost, we want to eradicate this ideology. But obviously, there's nothing genocidal there.

The real genocide, and I gave a college talk recently where I tried to make this case that the real going back to the suicide epidemic, which is a real problem among transit identified people. But the real genocide, when it comes to trans-identified people, is it's like a self-genocide. It is a community erasing itself. Well, it's even more demanded than that, I would say. We've been fed this activist nonsense, nonstop at an ever accelerating rate for 30 years, that the LGBT ever-expanding alphabet domain is a community. And first of all, it's not a community at all.

A community is based on a set of shared practice, let's say, and shared institutions, and shared values, let's say, and not merely on a set of infinitely expandable, subjectively identified proclivities. And so, and then worse than that, all the letters that hypothetically exist in this glorious rainbow don't exist peacefully without conflict. And here's the damning problem. Ken Zucker, who is probably the world's leading expert on gender dysmorphia and children and who had his reputation salvaged and his career destroyed by pathological narcissistic activists who eventually defeated in court in Canada. By the way, noted long ago, before all of this became whatever the hell it is now, that the proper default

treatment for kids with bodily dysmorphia was to leave them the hell alone until they were 18. And he established that as a consequence of careful research analysis in a non-political manner. And I say that because Zuckers and old school clinical psychologist and he was essentially a research scientist and he ran a gender dysphoria treatment clinic up in Toronto, the foremost of its kind in the world, and was also the lead editor of the most prominent scientific journal dealing with transgender matters. So Zucker was actually as close to a reasonable scientific

ally of the transgender community as they've ever emerged. And what he observed as a consequence of his decades of work was that, first of all, the best thing to do with kids with body dysmorphia was to just leave them the hell alone till they were 18. And the reason for that was, well, first of all, the first reason was that about 80% of them ended up gay. And so part of the reason they were bodily dysmorphic when they were very young is because they were homosexual and there was some tension between their emerging sexual proclivity and their biological reality,

at least in contrast to what was normative. 80% of them would grow up to be gay. So that's not that surprising really, is it that hyper feminine little boys who are that way by temperament are going to grow up to be homosexual and on the other side, the female front, that the hyper masculine girls are gonna be

grow up butchy and more likely to be attracted to girls. I don't think that's a real surprise to anybody, But the fact that it's 80% is quite the statistic. And what that means is that 80% of the kids who are being transformed, surgically, are gay. And so if there's a genocide, so to speak, and there isn't. But if there's a case of mass abuse of the gay community, the most egregious examples of those mass abuse is occurring at the hands of the trans activists, not the heterosexual monogamous. I think the gay community was a hell of a lot better off when they were oppressed by the heterosexual monogamous, than when they are allied with

the trans activists. And this brings up another point, I think, that might be worth making. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, is that I believe that we have to have an ideal at the center of our collective notions of sexual identity. And I think that ideal has to be long-term, stable, monogamous, heterosexual, married, child-centered couples. That's the ideal. And then there's going to be a periphery around that where all the mortals live who can't live up to that. And that's pretty much everybody because people's marriages are unstable and people get divorced. And there are

gay people. And, you know, everybody falls short of the ideal. But you might say, well, because we all fall short of the ideal, we should just scrap the damn ideal. But then nobody can communicate. Nobody knows what to do with each other. And that's a problem. But also worse than that, I think the people who suffer first when the ideal collapses are the people on the periphery. And so if we destroy that monogamous heterosexual ideal, well, what's happened very rapidly, we destroyed that, we undermined it. And now gay kids are being surgically mutilated and sterilized. That doesn't look to me like an improvement. So the ideal stabilizes the periphery just as much as it stabilizes the core.

That's another fundamental flaw in postmodern doctrine because they don't, the postmodernists, they would claim the opposite. Yeah, that's an interesting point. I think you're exactly right that we have, when you have the ideal, then at least we know collectively where we should be headed and what we should, when you have the ideal, then at least we know collectively where we should be headed and what we should, what direction we should be looking in. And this is what has frustrated me, this is an understatement about leftism for as long as I've been aware of any of this, which is that they come along and they say, no, it's

not that anymore, that's not the ideal, that's not anything. That's patriarchal and bigoted. We don't really get rid of that. And then we ask, well, okay, what's next? Now what? So it's the now what question that they can never answer. All they have certain targets in mind of things they want to tear down and destroy, but they never put anything new in its place. I think I think we get this wrong sometimes on the right.

I get it wrong too because I'll say that the left, they're always redefining words. They don't actually redefine the words. They just get rid of the, they empty a word of its meaning and its definition. But they don't come up with a new definition for it. That's the whole point of what is a woman. It's not like they came up with some new, but still logically consistent definition for it. They just said, no, that's not a thing that doesn't exist anymore. Well, the definition is it's whatever we want it to be at the moment. And you know, I actually think this is at the core of the pathology of the radical activists, because that's actually

their fundamental claim. Their fundamental claim is things are exactly what we want them to be in the moment. And to me, that's a worship of the worst excesses of impulsive hedonism. Right? It's like I can just have it whatever way I want right now. And so you don't get to call me out on some sort of transcendent identity or unity or conception that's going to replace what I want to tear down. Because if I accepted that, then there'd be now something else that would get my way when

I want to do just what the hell I want this moment. And like the radical claim is basically, that's exactly what it is as far as I can see. And I also think that's mostly what's been celebrated in these pride parades. It's not a stable alternative identity that could arise to replace in all its rainbow brilliance and glory, the fundamental unity of heterosexual monogamy. It's, I want to do whatever the hell I want to do with whoever the hell I want to do, wherever I want to do it at any point in time. And I'm not willing to accept any conceptual framework whatsoever that's going to interfere with my hedonic, impulsive, immediate self-gratification.

And when I look at that as a clinician, I think that's exactly what the most ill-behaved two-year-olds think. And I mean that technically. exactly what the most ill-behaved two-year-olds think. And I mean that technically. Like, very badly behaved two-year-olds, 100% identify themselves subjectively, and they 100% demand to have their subjective hedonic demands met right now.

Or they tantrum. Or they get aggressive. I mean, because the handful of two-year-olds who are aggressive are exactly in that category of two-year-olds. And so I see this as the emergence of an anti-philosophy, like a pantheistic, paganistic, anti-philosophy that's so immature and hedonic, hedonistic in its essence, that it's a kind of reverse miracle. Yeah, I think, and it doesn't, we can talk about all the moral problems with it, not the logical problems, but it also, it doesn't work. It just doesn't work as a just doesn't work as a philosophy. It certainly doesn't work as a map to living your life

and being happy. And just like the two-year-old, you mentioned, the other thing about two-year-old like that is that the two-year-old's always upset about something, always finding something to be upset about. Because you actually can't, if you go to a two-year-old, it's not terribly behaved. But if you go to a two year old, there's not terribly behaved. But if you go to a two year old and if you tell the two year old, okay, this is what we're

doing, they're going to find a problem with that. But then if you go to a two year old, I say, what do you want to do? Well, let's just do whatever you want to do. They won't be able to make up their mind about that either because they don't know what they want because they're two. And I think that we see that a lot. That's sort of the gender ideology is a, it's an anxiety machine. It creates anxiety because if I were to do my own psychological analysis, I

would say that, you know, anxiety is the awareness or the fear of the unknown. And with gender ideology and all this stuff we see on the LGBT left, people are making themselves unknown to themselves. They don't even know who they are. They don't know anything. And so they're just, their whole world is clouded in this suffocating anxiety. But they can't see clearly enough to realize that it's this worldview that's creating all this anxiety. Yeah, well, you know, technically, and this is true at the deepest level of analysis, anxiety is a marker for emergent entropy or disorder. So if you replace a unity of identity and purpose with a plethora of identities and

purposes, especially an unlimited plethora, you replace a map with a destination and a pathway with a map that leads to absolutely every place that can be imagined all at once. And that's no map at all. You know, there's actually a literature on consumer choice that shows this quite clearly. So you might say, well, you want to go buy a shampoo. You might think, well, how many shampoos do you want to choose from? And you think, well, how about a thousand? I want to walk into a pharmacy and I want to see a many shampoos do you want to choose from? And you think, well, how about a thousand? I want to walk into a pharmacy and I want to see a thousand shampoos on the shelf, because

then I can make the best choice. And so then you let people have access to the thousand shampoos that they're all on a pharmacy shelf. And you test them to see if they're satisfied with their purchase. And the answer is, they're not satisfied at all. And the reason for that is, what's the probability that you pick the best shampoo out of that thousand? And the probability is zero because like, what the hell do you know about shampoo? So for sure, you picked a suboptimal choice. Now, if there was only one shampoo, well,

that might annoy you too. What you probably want is like three. And that's, you see that with kids too. You know, if you open up a closet door and the kids got a hundred pieces of clothes to wear and you say, pick whatever you want, well, that'll just generally make them upset. And if you say, look, kid, you have to wear this. That doesn't make them very happy either. But if you lay like three pieces of clothes on the bed and you say, well, what do you pick from here? Then they're happy. There is this notion on the radical activist side. It's kind of an anarchic notion, right? That any limitation on choice is a transgression against creative freedom. But that's not bounded by the realization that infinite choice is equivalent to endless anxiety and the abyss.

And this catastrophic increase in anxiety that we see, this decrease in mental health, is in large part a consequence of, it's not freedom, it's chaos. It's anarchic chaos. That's not freedom. That's anarchic chaos. And all it does is produce misery. Yeah, I think it was, I don't see asking brothers,

Caramazov, the modern man, interprets freedom as the rapid multiplication and satisfaction of desire. And that's exactly what I think we're talking about here. I also not to get a sidetrack, but this is a point that I, well, you just said about consumer choice. I was recently trying to convey this about the dating world. I actually think, because I hear from young people all the time, men and women, who are

just like hopeless in the dating world, and they're almost in despair over ever finding someone, finding a quality match. just like hopeless in the dating world. And they're almost in despair over ever finding someone finding a quality match. And I think that there's a little bit of this over the thousand shampoo symptom here where you know, there's a million different dating apps and you can just cycle through people, swipe through. You don't have to limit yourself to whoever's in your community or at work or somebody you meet at the grocery store. And it's actually so many so that people on the in the dating world, they feel like there's not enough options. It's actually there's so many that they don't know, they can't narrow it down and whoever they settle on, they're always going to be thinking about, well, it could have been

that other guy instead. So I think that I think we see this manifesting itself in anyways. Yeah, well, the other thing, you know, the other problem too is so with regards to the activist insistence on how someone subjectively feels in the moments like, well, the pathway to happiness is for you to find out how you feel in the moment and then to pursue that. It's like, well, here's a problem with that. All the self-conscious impulses, so every thought you have that's related to contemplation of yourself, is identical statistically to the experience of negative emotion, anxiety. All self-conscious thought loads on anxiety. So much so that one of the most famous personality tests, which is the Neopir, it's a five-dimensional,

big five-trade personality test. It was one of the early ones, and it's a landmark in the field. Self-consciousness is actually a facet of neuroticism, which is the general proclivity to negative emotion. And so what that means literally is what it means is that the best pathway to misery is to continually think about how you feel. And you know that, you know, when you're on stage and you become self-conscious, it's not like you're happy, you're upset, and you turn red, and you sweat because now you're self-conscious.

You're concerned about how you appear in the eyes of others, right? That self-consciousness, you're aware of your flaws and your inadequacies. And this insane insistence we have on teach children now to focus on how they feel subjectively every moment to check in to see if they're happy. All that is, um, is, of course, Greg Luke-in-off has pointed this out. If universities had set out to, as, to make it their goal, to produce anxious and erotic students, they couldn't have designed a course that's better than what they currently teach kids. Avoid everything that makes you uncomfortable, complain if anything ever triggers you, so accidentally makes you uncomfortable, and do nothing but think about how you feel all the time. Those any behavioral psychologists, for example, knows that that's

the worst possible pathway to developing an anxiety disorder, because that's what people with anxiety disorders do. What you do as a behavioral counselor is you teach people to do none of those things. So yeah, so that's the downside of hedonism, right? Because you have to think about what you feel all the time. Well, that's self-consciousness and there's no distinction between that misery. So that's kind of a miserable conclusion, but... And you're also... You have to enlist everyone else to participate in this with you, which is why the claim from the left that, well, this doesn't affect you, you know, this is my own lifestyle, it doesn't affect you. It was my own lifestyle, it doesn't affect you. It was always, that was always a slight of hand trick.

It was never true. Especially it's not true now because they're telling us that someone else's self-perception, their feelings about themselves, is that's our project. We are now, you've been morally and legally all- regulated.

We are conscripted into this against our will into this army and our job is to prop up This person's precarious self-perception Well that at every moment the reason the reason for that Matt I think is that if you're asking people to play an impossible game Which is a game that has no rules and has no definition The only way you can get them to play that game is by forcing them by using compulsion. And I would also say that any game

that requires compulsion is a bad game. Any kid who requires compulsion to get other kids to play with him is an unpopular kid by definition. That's part of the reason that identity has to be socially negotiated. And if you're setting up an identity that you have to compel me to accept, that's primafassi evidence that your identity is not, you said they don't work these identities.

It's like, well, yeah, obviously, if you have to force people to abide by the demands of the identity, the identity doesn't work. Because if it worked, you wouldn't have to force people. They would just play along with you voluntarily. That's a good identity, that's a good definition. If you have a well-defined subjective identity, then other people will play along with you voluntarily. Like that's really a great technical definition of what constitutes a healthy and functional identity.

You see this with kids is, when kids turn three, the popular kids negotiate an identity that other children want to be part of. That's what makes them popular. That's what gives them friends. Yeah. And if you even have the desire to try to get other people to participate in the first place, then that should be your first hint that there's something wrong. Because I, you know, we all do this at some level. But for most of us, like, for me,

I don't, everybody goes along with the idea that I'm a man because I just am, but I never have to, I don't look to anyone to affirm that. And if anybody ever came along and said, call me a she or something or call me a woman. I would laugh at them like the jokes on you, you're ridiculous. It wouldn't cause any problems for me. But we all have, maybe if we go a little bit further up, there are something about you that you're actually insecure about. Some trait that you wish was true, but you're not really sure. That's the one that you're more likely to bring up to somebody else, sort of like describing

yourself to this other person, unprompted, because you want them to agree with it. So you can convince yourself that that's true about you. And I think we all do that with some things. The problem is with the gender ideology stuff. People are doing that with the most core aspects of who they are. And now they have wrapped other people up into what they say is like this life or death situation, where we have to say exactly what they're already thinking, or they might end up killing themselves, or end up dead somehow. Right, well, and you might end up on the receiving end of moral outrage or criminal charges. In my case, for example, my clinical license is on the table because, you know, I dead named Alan Page, and I'll do that again, which I just did, by the way.

And Will Thomas, let's say, know that I transgressed against this social norm that's now sufficiently a moral crime to justify what's essentially prosecution in a, in a, it's not precisely a criminal sense, but it's the next best thing if you're a professional, you know, and so yeah, this is gone way too far. So look, Matt, what is there anything else we're running out of time here on this front? We're going to go talk on the daily wire plus side of things for about half an hour. I'd like to talk to you about the development of your journalistic interest and how you ended up where you are. And so anybody who's watching and listening

and found this conversation useful and compelling could head over to the Daily Wire plus side of things and check out the last half an hour. But Matt, we walked through, you know, what motivated you on the documentary front to produce this, what is a woman and what you learned and what you've concluded as a consequence. Is there anything else that you'd like to bring up? Well, I felt pretty thorough. I'm sure there's plenty more that could be said, but I think we covered a lot of interesting

angles there. Okay, good, good. Well, so let me just ask you one thing in closing. So you spend a lot of time and effort producing this documentary. What do you do now? And do you have something equally trouble-making on the on the back burner, so to speak, or the front burner now? What are you up to at the moment? We've got, we've got different pokers in the fire. I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be satisfied if we weren't trying to get into some kind of trouble. So we stay tuned, I guess. All right. All right. Well, look, thanks very much for talking to me today and everybody watching and listening on the YouTube side of the world. Appreciate your time and effort to the daily wire plus folks for professionalizing my productions and making this conversation straightforward from a technical perspective and high quality. Appreciate that to the film crew here in Billings,

Montana, because that's where I am today. Thanks for your help and we'll extremely well. And, uh, well, Matt, uh, let's wander over to the Daily Wire Plus side of things and finish our conversation. Bye-bye, everybody. Thanks for your time and attention. And thanks, Matt, for agreeing to talk to me today. Thank you. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on

dailywireplus.com.