The Megyn Kelly Show - A Deep Dive into Detransitioners, with Experts, Doctors, and Those Who Have Been Through It | Ep. 367

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Megyn Kelly takes a deep dive into the important issue of transitioning and detransitioning. Joining the show are Walt Heyer and Grace Lidinsky-Smith, who have detransitioned after transitioning to the opposite gender, who discuss the trauma that led to transitioning, the validation they got after transitioning, the struggles that led them to detransition, the hormone therapy and surgery related to the procedures, the internet and cultural impact that helps lead to quick transitioning, the defense mechanism of transitioning, the backlash detransitioners can face for speaking publicly, the rise in young girls transitioning, and more. Then pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason and clinical psychologist Dr. Erica Anderson join the show to talk about the push to "affirm" only, puberty blockers, the way America is lagging behind Europe in having a nuanced point of view, the need for individualized care, the need to have different treatments for adults and children, the policing out of society of gay identities, how toxic masculinity is leading to some teen boys to transition, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, a deep dive into the world of transitioning and de-transitioning. You will hear directly from those who went through the treatments and procedures, hormones, surgeries, but eventually went on to regret their decision. And later we'll be joined by two doctors to discuss this topic through a medical lens as there's breaking news on the American Academy of Pediatrics and what it's doing to really prevent any debate on this issue. But first, I want to bring you the stories of Walt Heyer and Grace Ladinsky-Smith. Walt says his childhood greatly impacted his decision to

transition, but that transition did not come until he was in his 40s when he became Laura Jensen. Eight years later, he detransitioned. And grace dealt with gender identity issues in her 20s before undergoing a double mastectomy and then later realizing she had made a severe mistake she too detransitioned back to a woman they both speak openly now about their experiences in an effort to help others but it does not go down without backlash from the trans activists. So it is brave of them to do this, and we appreciate them being here. Walt and Grace, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show. Yeah, pleasure to be on. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Of course. It's absolute nonsense that you should experience any backlash whatsoever. So I know it's somewhat, at this point, you're probably used to it, but it's somewhat risky to come on. And you get people, it's not just backlash like, oh, they're terrible. It's backlash like, you dehumanized me. People make it very personal, trying to make it sound like you've issued personal attacks. Meanwhile, you're just telling your personal stories and raising concerns. And I appreciate that. So let's start with your backstory so that people understand how you came to these opinions very honestly and not without some fair amount of trauma. Walt, I'll start with you. I was fascinated to see you were born in 1940.

Now, that means you went through all of this at a time when it was verboten. You know, it wasn't like today where you're surrounded by a bunch of pushers, but in your own personal experience, you kind of were. You were out in San Francisco when you decided to actually go through with transitioning and reading your backstory. It seems like you kind of did have some pushers. Let's start before that. When you're a little boy, what happened? I know there are a couple central traumas that you think played into your belief you needed to transition. Yeah. Thank you, Megan, for allowing both of us to share this. But yeah, my story started in 1944 before there was any dialogue about the words know, the words they use today, you know, transitioning

and transgender and gender dysphoria. Simply put, what I've learned now in 77 years is that when grandma made me a purple chiffon dress when my dad dropped me off, and she would babysit me for the weekend, and he would go fishing in the California mountains for two or three days with my mom. And so she made me this purple chiffon dress and put it on me, made it specifically for my little four-year-old body, and told me how cute I looked. And it all seemed kind of benign and sort of fun. What I didn't realize and what I've learned in the 77 years is that putting me, a four-year-old boy, in a dress and then telling him how cute he looks and then

dressing me up every time I was over there in that dress really became emotional and psychological child abuse that eventually led to sexual abuse. And so what I really talk a lot about, Megan, is the fact that people don't understand the consequences. We just sort of go through these motions about cross-dressing kids and we think it's cool and it's acceptable. Well, it's not so cool. It is acceptable, but it's also very harmful. And so when my parents, because it was kept a secret, my grandma kept it a secret for two and a half years. And so one time I went home, I took the purple dress in a brown paper bag back home when dad picked me up. And my parents found it a couple of days later and said, where'd the dress come from? And I said, well, grandma made it. And then frankly, all hell broke

loose in the house. And I was never allowed to go back to grandma's house, but the damage in the two and a half years to my young psyche was done. And so dad then not knowing what to do, decided that he wouldied on me was harmful as well. And then not long after that, my dad's adopted brother, Uncle Fred, decided to sexually molest me when I was eight and nine years old. So you have the psychological and emotional abuse of being cross-dressed by grandma. And then you have the physical abuse for the hardwood floor plank, and then you have sexual abuse. All these things occurred before I was 10 years old. And what we know today is that this is called adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, and it's a traumatic childhood. And at that point, the proper thing would have been to have me treated for trauma and understand

that it's adverse childhood experiences cause the brain to be altered at the level of our identity. And this is kind of what we know today has been studied since the 1990s, but nobody's talking about it. And so I thought I should have been a girl when I was 10 and 11 and 12. And I took on an identity when I was 13 of Crystal West as a secret. I didn't go out because in those days, this is the early 50s, nobody's really talking about this idea. And so I was secretly cross-dressing and hiding everything I was doing. But yet I had all this feelings going

on about I was born in the wrong body. And then Christine Jorgensen hit the airwaves and became kind of the big deal in the 50s. And that's what led me to think, oh, that must be who I am. So I had a way to identify what I thought I was through Christine Jorgensen. It was a false premise, because no one has ever, ever in the history of mankind ever changed their gender. But we buy into this idea. And so that led me on. I was never homosexual. I ended up going to college, getting married, having two children. I had a successful career in the automobile industry. I also worked on the Apollo space missions as an associate design engineer in the area of cryogenics, struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction as a result of not dealing with

the adverse childhood that I had, the sexual abuse, emotional and physical abuse, which should have been treated much earlier in life, led me to go to a gender therapist who said, well, you have gender dysphoria and what you need is hormones and surgery. But there was no voice like Walt Heyer out there at the time. Nobody's saying the bridge is out. Don't do this. It's not going to fix you. It's only going to cause more harm and ruin your life. And so Dr. Paul Walker, who was the author of the original standards of care that are in place today, was my therapist, told me I needed hormones and surgery. I bought into it. I had the surgery in 1983 and went on to live a life of Laura Jensen working for the federal government at FDIC and the Postal Service only to regret and realize that I never needed surgery. I never needed hormones.

I did need therapy for the trauma that had been caused during my life, the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that I suffered. And that's actually, Megan, what I find in 100% of the people, the thousands of people that I've worked with over the last many years. I mean, I detransitioned well over 30 years ago. And my website, Sex Change Regret, has had well over 2 million views just in the last few years. So we know this is a serious problem, regret that is, and it's how do we go about it? Well, we realize that things happen in their childhood that cause them to not like who they are, and they adopt this idea that they can go through a gender change that is quite frankly impossible because changing genders, quite frankly, was all fixed and innate and unchangeable at the time of conception when the sperm hit the egg.

So the game was over. So we're really only able to change our identity cosmetically, but we can never biologically change who we are. And that's kind of where I am. And I've been working with people every single day, seven days a week, 365 days a year for over a dozen years. So much in there, Walt. When you talk about your grandmother dressing you in the dress, it reminds me of the backstory of Ernest Hemingway. I don't know if you've ever heard that, but he had a mother who put him in a dress too and treated him like he was a little girl. And of course, Ernest Hemingway would grow up to be an amazing writer, but also somebody who would take his own life and led.

It had severe alcoholism and a lot of problems. I'm not saying it was all related to that, but childhood traumas can come in all different shapes and sizes and forms. And it's very different from having a little boy who just for fun wants to put on a dress and parade around or a little girl who wants to, you know, dresses like a football player just in, in terms of, you know, role play and normal childhood development. That's very different from having a grownup dress you as the opposite sex and sort of impose the role playing on you. Um, when you didn't, you don't really understand it. That's exactly right. This point that you're making about the unwillingness to examine other traumas that may be leading to these feelings of confusion around gender is the culprit. It's the culprit that we're dealing with on so many levels today. And it's what makes what the doctors are doing so shameful.

You know, to the contrary, if you try to explore what else is happening, is there a divorce in your family? Do you suffer childhood trauma? They accuse you as a doctor in today's day and age of conversion therapy, of trying to engage in something close to conversion therapy, as opposed to just figuring out whether you really have a transgender or gender dysphoric person in front of you. Grace, you came at this at a much different point in time. You are 28 years old now. So you were born in the 90s, if my math is correct. And I would imagine that, so like how old were you when you first started to wrestle with issues of gender? Well, I was sort of lightly wrestling with gender identity from, I think, like 19 or 20 in college, more along the lines of considering myself maybe non-binary, which is more of a, like, I don't conform to any gender role style identity. And I had really been very, like, socially conscious, very involved in, like, feminist analysis and, like, leftist

sort of analysis of society. And I felt, I think, very, I guess, socially anxious and insecure about my place in society and about my body. And that escalated in my 20s. When I was 22, I started to seriously question my gender and question whether medical transition might be right for me. This coincided with a really dark period in my life where I had a bout of intense depression and suicidal ideation. And during that really dark time, the idea that my sort of lifelong body problems and social anxiety could actually be caused by being transgender and actually like needing a different shape and sort of body to thrive felt like an epiphany to me that I had just come to. And I was obsessed with the idea and I thought that it would be the thing that would save me and allow me to finally feel normal after a young adulthood, just feeling weird and out of place. And I could

put together evidence from my past, like asking for a boy's haircut when I was young was something that I did. I often had short hair. I often was, you know, resistant to different ways that people treated me as a woman that I felt were, you know, stereotypical and, you know, putting unfair expectations on me. But honestly, it was a period of intense mental distress. And I, you know, I connected all the dots in my head. And I thought that I was transgender and supposed to be a man. So I sought out a gender therapist and a hormone providing clinic. The situation with the clinic was they did informed consent. So all I needed to do was answer the question, why do you want to go on hormones? And I told them being a woman is not working for me.

And they said, sounds good. And they gave me a bunch of papers to sign. And I got on testosterone. At first, I felt great. I felt like I was on the right path because I was feeling more energetic. I wasn't as stuck in this quagmire of depression anymore. I took that as a sign I was on the right path. And then very quickly, because it was so uncomfortable to bind my breasts. And because I thought that when I truly

started passing as a man, I could really start to like move on and build my life. I signed up to get double mastectomy, also known as top surgery. I did that after about four months on hormones, I think. So yeah, it was very fast. I was in an obsessive state of mind. The surgery was an intense experience and I started feeling some regrets and doubts afterwards, but pushed them down for a while. feeling so just distressed and overwrought with doubt at how the surgery had made me feel that I decided to take a break from testosterone. And I slowly started to realize that I had made a huge mistake. What else happened to you when you went on testosterone? Well, my voice started to deepen. I started to grow hair on my body. It had a sort of antidepressant effect, which was nice because I had been sort of wallowing in deep sadness and aimlessness. So that ended up giving me a placebo effect for a while that I was on the right path. It also gave me, I think, energy and it also stifled my more emotions of like sadness and fear, which may have contributed to going forward with the surgery so

quickly. Right. And what did, were you somebody who was down the internet rabbit holes on transitioning and top surgery? You know, we see this very common, especially amongst women younger than you who go through this, where they've spent three hours or five hours a day on Reddit or YouTube and seeing, you know, it's like they talk about top surgery, which is like this, as you point out, the sort of carefree way of saying double mastectomy. I mean, having your body parts cut off and for a young woman, you know, it's a massive decision, but I wonder whether you were one of those people who was on the internet all the time being fed information like it's not a thing and you're going to love it and it's all good. Come on in. Yeah, I definitely think that internet addiction played into my dissociation from my body and also

imbibing vast quantities of material fantasizing about how awesome transition would be was a huge part of my routine around that time. Looking back, it's easy to see that I was in an obsessive rabbit hole, but I think that it's a pattern that a lot of detransitioners talk about is sort of getting sucked into this world and just exposing yourself over and over again to this promotional material for these surgeries and hormones, essentially. It's hugely seductive. I'm going to guess, I'm going to go back to Walt in a second, but when Walt did this, his doctor may have been very supportive versus the rest of the medical community back then. But I bet society wasn't because, you know, it who declares themselves trans it had already been placed we went from like why is it okay to hate transgender people um to every transgender's

person's decision must be celebrated as if 100 unassailable and any doubt expressed about whether it was right for this person makes one a bigot. And so, so did you experience that like sort of snaps and positivity and like society patting you on the back for this? Yeah. I mean, I think that, um, I certainly had people in my life who were like worried about what I was doing, but no one really questioned me all that much. And a lot of people were very positive. And I think they meant well by that. You know, I don't take that, uh, I don't take that badly, but, um, it's not a cultural script, uh, that allows for a lot of, you know, saying to someone

like, Hey, you know, you seem like you might be in a weird place, you know, you know, what's what might be the factors going into this, and especially from like, you know, doctors and therapists are the sort of people that I would hope would ask those questions. And certainly, in those cases, I just didn't really get any investigation from those figures. So Walt, I'm going to guess you did not get snaps from society. And I understand you had two kids who did not want to be part of your life once you transitioned. So you must have felt very driven to do it anyway. You know, I look at the people who went through it back back before we got to this point and think you must have felt the need to do it on a very deep level because all

of society was telling you back then, you're a freak. I mean, that was sort of where we were for most of society prior to the past 10, 15 years. Yeah, I think that's so important to talk about because I was driven, but what I was really driven by that I realized today as we're talking, Megan, is being sexually abused and physically and emotionally abused. I did not want to be who I was because of the things that happened to me. And the only alternative was to become someone else. And so this is what happens to many of the people that I work with. And I've specifically talked to them and say, you know, why did you do this? And why did you, as a man want to become a woman, and some of the people have reported to me

that they wanted to remove their genitalia, not because they wanted to be women, but because they never wanted to be touched there again. So it was cutting their genitals off was a defense mechanism against ever being sexually abused again. And so I think this is why it's so important for when I went in and talked to Dr. Walker and told him about my childhood history, it's totally ignored. They don't look at that as reasons to consider that the person is driven by being abused physically or any other way, that it's just about getting hormones and getting surgery. And a good clinician would have been able to see that

there was tremendous trauma and that that's what needed to be dealt with. And yeah, I was rejected wholeheartedly by absolutely everyone. But that really wasn't that hard on me. I mean, I did go dramatically from working in the auto industry with a paycheck of well over a thousand dollars net per week to being homeless and broke, living in a park on Second Street in Long Beach because I couldn't get a job because I was through the divorce, lost absolutely everything, including a car or any ability to make an income. And no one would hire me back in the auto industry because of what I went through. So I ended up doing catering and washing dishes. And I estimated having, I don't know, a hundred or so different jobs. Some of them were house cleaning and very domestic kind of things to survive. I lived in houses and in bedrooms with people where I could get a place to stay. And so this was sort of the crawlback. And what I really wanted to find out was, I really wanted to make Laura work. And so I started studying psychology. And when I started studying psychology, strangely enough, I started looking in the books at UC Santa Cruz when I was there in the psychology books and found out, wow, these individuals who identify as transgender have a lot of psychological issues. They, you know, they suffer from body

dysmorphia and dissociative disorders, schizophrenia, and separation anxiety was actually the first story that I read about that shocked me to my core, where a young man's, his mother had passed away, and he decided to be transgender. Why? Because he was going to take on his mother's identity as a female in an effort to keep his mother alive. And that just jarred me. And I thought, wow, there's some deep psychological issues to this. And that's when I really began to dig in. And I studied psychology for two years at UC Santa Cruz. Then I started working in psychiatric hospitals and other for what happened to you, but you have to identify what it is that caused you to not like who you were. And once I was able to do that, I began to heal quickly. And that's what I do with the people I work with. And every one of

them can tell me when I work with them over a period of time, what happened that caused them to not like who they were and why they dove into this idea about changing their genders? And so it's it's it's like you have some sort of pernicious cancer. You know, you have pancreatic cancer and you go to see the doctor and the doctor says you need a knee replacement and you wind up getting the knee replacement, which hurts a lot and is very unpleasant to go through. And when you're on the opposite side of the knee replacement, all those issues that you went to the doctor for in the first place don't feel better. In fact, they've gotten worse because they've gone on untreated even longer, the cancer. And now you have a new problem to deal with, which is a sore knee and pain associated with a surgical procedure that you didn't need.

And so that's kind of what we're doing to a lot of these, especially young people. I mean, you guys were of age when you transitioned and detransitioned, meaning over 18. But we're doing this to very young children now, which is what makes it so controversial. But I have great empathy for you, too, just because it was done to you when you were an adult doesn't make it OK. You know, I mean, for you, Grace, it was like, okay, like you say at the clinic, like you're good, you're fine. Yes. Let's take off your breasts. We shouldn't stop caring about people just because they're over the age of 18, especially when it's obvious they're having psychological trauma. So what happened to you, Grace, when you decided, I'm going to stop the testosterone? And when was the moment you said, not just that, I'm going to go back to being a woman as I was born?

Well, it was sort of a series of steps. Because as you can imagine, it was really hard to admit to myself that I might have made a mistake of that, you know, that scale. And I had to walk it back slowly. So I thought, well, maybe I've overshot, maybe like, I want to be more androgynous. So I stopped the testosterone. And once I stopped the testosterone, a lot of the feelings that the, you know, basically steroid had suppressed in me started flooding back. And it, it's hard to explain because it's so intense, but I would just describe it as sort of an epiphany again, that I just had been basically like shoving things under the rug and like lying to myself about what was really like going on. And it just became impossible to deny that my expectation for transition, which was that I would feel more like me and more natural, you know, whatever that meant

had not been met. I felt like I was playing a role. And I felt like I was trying to bury, bury my emotions and become someone else, which, like Walt said, I think is pretty common. And it also was clear that I had just really hurt myself really, really badly by having a mastectomy. And there was sort of a truth to that in my body that I could no longer deny. So it took me a few months to come to terms with that. But then I realized that the whole framework of obsessing over my gender identity and trying to control how other people saw me was just really unhealthy for me. Yeah. I can relate to what you're saying on one level. I was born in 1970 and, um, never wore a dress, only wore boys clothes. My cowboy outfit was my

favorite one, but, uh, you know, boys, Navy sweatshirts and little Levi jeans. And my mother, you say, please, please, we wear a dress. And I said, no, I don't want it. And I want Incredible Hulk and I want Stretch Armstrong and I want G.I. Joe and I don't want Barbie. And I had a boy's haircut, just like you said. I wanted to like all of that. And in no way was I trans. No way was I guess back then you'd say I was gender nonconforming. I played on the all boys baseball team. I was the only girl today. They'd'd be saying, you're a boy. And as anyone can see, I'm all woman. And today, I have a more androgynous look. I've got my sort of male tank top on. I've got my hair back. But that doesn't make me anything other than a woman. There's just no space in today's day and age for gender nonconformance. It's just nonconformity. It's just you're trans. And it's with huge risks

that we're doing that. Walt has written and said a lot about this exact issue. And we're going to pick it up with Walt realizing that he was Walt and he wanted to live as Walt right after a very quick break. Thank you so much again to both of you for being here. We're going to come right back with our panel in one minute. Walton Grace, stay with us. I've done so many stories on trans kids and trans people over the many, many years I've been in media and the backlash to even speaking about it in the in the quote wrong way will get glad on your back for weeks. And I saw it happen to you, Grace, because I saw that great 60 Minutes piece they did on on detransitioners. And you told your story. And sure enough, glad came out, started ripping on 60

Minutes, ripping on you, ripping. And what they said was the same thing they always say. Here's just one example. Every major medical association supports affirming care. The guidelines are safe and well established. And as for our discussion about YouTube and the Internet rabbit holes, they said, aren't we past arguing that media can turn people gay or trans, which is such a sleight of hand to lump those two things in together, right? It's like the media cannot turn you gay, but social media influencers and influence can indeed confuse young people on the question of gender. That's true, and that's been studied

in places like Sweden and Finland. So it's not honest of them to lump those two things in together. What did you make of that backlash? Well, it was just really frustrating because I came at it from a perspective of just really wanting, you know, the best medical care for trans people and detransitioned people. And, you know, my experience was of medical care was not of careful assessment of my issues. They just didn't assess me at all, really. And, you know, at the time, I accepted that, and I have to take responsibility for my role in that. But, you know, that experience showed me

that there's not, you know, rigorous guidelines being followed. And that someone in my situation who's vulnerable and having a mental health episode can indeed be really badly hurt. And the backlash to the 60 Minutes episode was really intense. And you can see on the 60 Minutes website, they did a piece about how there was backlash before the episode even aired. And I think the host said there was more backlash than she'd ever had for any other segment. So I really felt like GLAAD was just trying to like shove the detransitioners under the rug and say that, you know, we're too small a percentage

to matter. And, you know, like we, I don't think we have really good numbers on this kind of thing. Like a lot of the studies that we have have high dropout rates. And, you know, it's a situation that's evolving really quickly. So it really hurt and was maddening to have these organizations that are supposed to be advocating for people's health and well being, especially of like gays and lesbians, and just have be totally like villainized by them. Yeah.

Basically just for talking about my story. Yeah. You get your snaps when you say you're trans, but when you say I made a mistake, you get attacked. I mean, viciously and Walt, I know you've,

you've spoken up about this. Let me, before I get you away on that, let's, we haven't gotten to you detransitioning and sort of realizing after you had, had surgery and lost your family and you know, your job and your homeless, it's like a lot happened to you, but that wasn't, that's not why you abandoned your life as a woman. It wasn't the losses that you suffered. It was sort of a different kind of epiphany. So talk to us about how you came to that

realization that you wanted to be Walt again. Yeah. Once I realized that I had taken my surgeon to court and Dr. Walker to court to have in San Mateo Superior Court of California, because I wanted to restore my birth certificate, which had been changed to Laura Jensen female. I wanted it back to Walt Heyer male. And I asked them to come to court and prove to the court in a document that you could actually change someone's gender, that the hormones and surgery were actually effective in changing someone's gender. They sent a document, which is in severe court of California, published 1990, that you cannot change anybody's gender with hormones and surgery. The only thing

that's kind of funny, the only thing you can do with hormones and surgery is neuter somebody. And I thought, well, that's interesting. That's what they do to dogs. So the whole thing I realized was a false, probably a medical fraud by any stretch of the imagination. from alcohol and drugs, I now have 36 years clean and sober. And during that time, doing my fourth step, working with a psychologist, we went into prayer. He's a Christian psychologist. And the Lord came to me during that prayer and looked at me and said, you are now safe with me. And he was holding this little baby in his hand. And I realized that baby was me and that I was redeemed and restored all the way back to my birth by the Lord Jesus Christ. And I realized at that point I'd been redeemed and restored. And it was really my job to go out and share with the world what redemption and restoration

is like in Christ and show them that no one has ever changed their gender and that there is freedom through the power and grace of Jesus Christ. Well, you know, now they don't define it that way, as you well know. They just say gender is a social construct. It's not really necessarily related at all to biology. And it's whatever you say it is. And, you know, it's crossed over to the point of absurdity. On the show yesterday, we were talking about somebody who identifies as a tiger who got hired by some marketing firm, I think somebody who says their moon gender or tree gen. I mean,

they've just taken it to the point of absurdity. You are whatever you just invent. But I've heard you say, I think you were on with Laura Ingram, saying they're ruining an entire generation of young people. That resonated with me. I can't stand the fact that this is being pushed on kids, including my own,

by school teachers and society as though it's a menu item they should consider their gender. They should reconsider when they never had questions about it. Yeah. Well, this is the horrifying part of this. And back in six years ago, I've been speaking about this and the schools have become an unsafe place for children.

Sorry to say. They're indoctrinating children. They're teaching them how to transition. Today, the schools are hiding from the parents the fact that the kids are encouraged to transition at school from one gender to the other. And so, to me, this is how we are completely destroying an entire generation of children. And see, I keep going back to the fact that nobody can change their gender. So why are we telling them this? And why are we suggesting that they're going to be better off? And I always look at this this way, with over 2 million views to my website, sexchangeregret.com. If what they are saying is true, that this is so

beneficial to have hormones and surgery, then why have I got two million views to my website, Sex Change Regret? Why do I have over 10,000 emails that have come to my website from people asking for help, whether a psychologist or a doctor or a person or a wife, mother? You know, this is what just drives me absolutely nuts. And so, you know, the fact of the matter is there's a lot of hurting people. And, you know, right now, I believe there's a lot more people out there. There's no way to track the number of detransitioners, no way to track them because most of them aren't in any studies. Of all the thousands of people I've worked with,

including myself, none of us have ever been counted among the detransitions, because there's no database. That's very interesting, because of course, I've seen the Princeton study that studied some, I think, 314 trans, was it kids? Let me just see, I'm going to make sure I can't remember if it was kids or grownups, but in any event, trans people. And they concluded that 94% remained trans after a period of years. And so they suggest, as do most of the trans activists, that detransitioning is very, very rare. And I don't know whether that's true or not true, but I know that it's very hard, as you were pointing out, Grace, once you've declared you're trans and had surgery and had all of society give you the snaps to then say, I made a terrible mistake.

So I do wonder if we were more supportive of detransitioners, how high those official numbers would climb. Yeah. Do you want me to answer that? Yeah, yeah, sure. You can go out and then I'll give it to Grace after. Yeah. There was a study done by the UK Guardian in 2006 where ARF, which is a large university in the UK studied, they took a hundred studies from around the world and they found out that what they found was the regret rate to be around 20%, and that the people that they found in these studies were traumatized to the point of surgery after going through this, excuse me, traumatized to the point of suicide after having the surgery. So what they reported was what I've found is that

many of the people regret deeply having, I'm working with a young man right now in his 20s, and he keeps calling me wanting to commit suicide because of him cutting his genitals off and he cannot have children. He was not homosexual. I was never homosexual. And so this is the downside to this. They're never going to count the detransitioners. They're going to continue to call it rare when it's not. And if it were rare, I would only have maybe 10 emails in my inbox and I'd only have 100 people come into the website. But that's not the case. That study I mentioned from by Princeton University was of kids between the ages of three and 12, claiming that 94% remained trans after a period of years. But it's like, those are, those are kids. And if you transition when you're between three and 12,

that's your parents doing that with you. That's, that's not an independent choice. There's a reason that we don't let minors make massive life decisions. They all require the consent of the parents because their brains aren't fully formed. You know, their cerebral cortex is not yet formed until 25. Nevermind three. It's, you know, it's, I don't know. I wrestle with it because I'll tell you something, Grace, when I was on NBC, we did a show with young kids who said that they were trans. And there was one family in particular that brought on, they had four boys and this was the fourth boy who declared that this boy was actually a girl. And the mother really helped and supported. And that child was living as a girl. And I think that the child was six years old. And I listened to the mother's story and I still feel such empathy for this mom.

And I loved the family. And I know that there are people who are genuinely transgender, you know, especially traditionally boys. You know, this is if you look back historically, it's been a very small percentage of boys. So I look back at the time, you know know we were still in a phase of like not accepting and I was much open very open-minded to it and now it just seems like we've exploded to be pushing it on kids who aren't really experiencing it and I feel very differently I don't know like how do you square where we used to be with where we are right now? I think that, you know, speaking as someone who's sort of been part of the younger or the more recent like trans culture, I think that just the, uh, conception of what it can mean to be trans and like the idea of what gender is, has really expanded, um, really rapidly.

And a lot more people and kids are seeing themselves within that definition. And, you know, people will argue about whether that's like a really positive, like new vocabulary for self-expression or if it's like, you know, more concerning. And I think that it is concerning in so far as there are serious medical procedures implicated and associated with, you know, identifying as trans. And I think that as the criteria for what it means to be trans expand more and more, and, you know, there's almost no like psychological gatekeeping. I think that we're just really running the risk of having more and more people go through these medical procedures and have it really be the wrong decision for them. We, of course,

talk about how you get threatened with suicide if you're a parent who doesn't support your kid's declaration that he or she is trans, right? That's the first thing they say to the parents, rather have a dead son or a live daughter, live daughter if you have a boy who's transitioning. And it's a trope and it's unfair. And what's interesting to me is these countries overseas, whether it's the UK or I mentioned Sweden and Finland and some evidence. They're actually doing real studies. One out of the UK, their National Institute for Care and Excellence, a governmental body that follows evidence-based, creates evidence-based guidelines, found the link between transitioning and improved psychological function was, in fact, extremely weak. They did not see evidence of improved psychological function post-transition. Walt, that's exactly the opposite of what our authorities tell us, that kids are going to commit suicide unless the entire society gets behind them and affirms their gender declarations. Well, you know, the advocates will tell you to use the suicide as do is to stop people from talking about you detransitioning or that you did something wrong. And so, you know, one of the things that's so interesting when you talked, if I can go back to the knee and treating the wrong thing, is that

there was a doctor, Charles L. Illenfeld, at the Harry Benjamin Clinic in the 1970s that had administered, he was an endocrinologist, a homosexual activist, loved the whole idea of transitioning people. He administered hormone therapy to 500 men over a six-year period of time. And he came out and spoke to therapists in Tappan, New York in 1979, saying, we should not be giving these individuals hormones and doing surgery on them because it's causing too much unhappy, to quote, too much unhappiness and too many suicides. And he said, I want you to know, as I speak to you as clinicians, I am now going to become a psychiatric doctor so that I can deal with the comorbid disorders that are actually causing their distress.

And so that's like what you're talking about with the knee. Here, Ellenfeld, an activist, was saying, I need to stop giving them hormones and start dealing with the psychiatric issues that are causing their discomfort. Mm-hmm. Listen, I know this from my own family because we had somebody in my own family declare that they were not a man, that they were a woman and transition, fully transition. And absolutely none of the psychological problems were solved. I mean, not just new ones were added and the suicidal threats, all of it. It was all there.

And I believe to this day had some therapy been applied, you know, who knows what could have happened but this was somebody who was saying, somebody who we related to by marriage, this was somebody

who was saying that by the time this person was a two-year-old boy, he knew that he, quote, was a she. I mean, those are the cases

where it's true like gender dysphoria from an early onset point in life that confuse the issue for me, because I do think there are a lot of non trans trans people. Right. The crazy it's happening with girls. But I think there are a lot of people who are trans who are really trans and like really just are determined to live their lives as the opposite sex and actually do become happier once they do it. Am I wrong about that, Walt? Well, what I have actually come to the conclusion is just from working with the people that I work with. So that's all I can address. And that is that the adult men that I work with, when I work with them, what we find out is that they were actually suffering from autogynephilia or transvestite fetish disorders, or they were just cross-dressers, that they were actually never

really trans. But because the gender clinics push this stuff, doing hormones and surgery, no one wants to talk about autogynephilia or transvestite fetish because it's kind of gory to talk about. Can I tell you something? I got to squeeze in a quick break, but let me tell you something. This person I'm talking about was cross-dressing secretly at first and swore that they weren't trans. And then it just sort of quickly morphed once this person started seeing therapists. This is the first time I've actually put that together. Thank you for that bit of insight. Stand by, Walt and Grace. They're staying with us and with much, much more to discuss.

And later we have two doctors with different perspectives to discuss what's happening in the medical community on this. Let's talk about what's happening now with teenage girls. Abigail Schreier, of course, in her wonderful book,

Irreversible Damage, has taken a deep dive into this and she's been proven right. I mean, time and time again. But of course, Amazon still suppress mean, time and time again. But of course, Amazon still suppresses the book and so on. But these studies that have come out, here's just a couple of numbers. The trans population growth, this is from a Williams Institute study. They say that today in the United States, over 1.6 million adults and youths, meaning 13 to 17, identify as trans, the numbers have doubled since 2017.

So the numbers are doubling in just five years' time. And who knows where it's going to go, given the way it's pushed by schools and doctors and therapists now. Similar data from overseas, again, Sweden and Finland are some of the two who actually take a hard look at it. They found that young people who sought care at Swedish clinics after 2015, increasingly teenage girls with multiple psychiatric diagnoses. It rose from four out of 100,000 to 77 out of 100,000 young women coming in. Same trend found in Finland, dramatic increase in female adolescents with gender dysphoria. There were five-fold more girls coming in, according to those running the clinics the adolescents who were referred to gender identity assessment had severe psychiatric problems and said the regrets of the detransitioners, the regrets would not manifest immediately. It would be after four or five years. But by that point, a lot of damage has been done. You know, you're on cross-gender hormones, you're on puberty blockers for that length of time. That's why Abigail named the book Irreversible Damage.

Grace, what do you make of it as a young girl yourself who dealt with a lot of these issues, the spike, the enormous spike amongst young girls going through this? Yeah, I think that it is, I consider it to be probably somewhat similar to like the spikes and like bulimia and anorexia that happened a little while back. I think that many young girls are dealing with real distress around their bodies, real, you know, frivolous or something that can just be waved away. But I think that they're finding this framework of being trans that offers what seems to be, you know, a solution to these sort of went for it, I think that it is very seductive solution to think that actually your body is wrong and you need to change it in order to be happy. And it could be that easy. So I do worry a lot about the spike because I think that, like I said, it's a very appealing idea that would appeal to a lot of like classic, you know, like time old female sort of anguishes around the body image and, you know, figuring out who you are. Yeah. I mean, when they ask you if you feel comfortable in your body, what teenager says yes to that? No one does. I mean, that can't be the standard. And yet it is, you know, while the Biden administration is going a different way, they're not going like Finland and Sweden and the UK are pumping the brakes on these treatments for underage people who claim that they're trans, saying the first line of defense should be psychotherapy, should be examining what psychological issues are causing you to feel this

way and not puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones or surgery. We're going exactly the opposite way in the United States. We're making it easier than ever. Some of the more red states are trying to push back, but the Biden administration just came out with an executive order saying we want to enhance protections for transgender children. That means make it easier for them to transition. We want to increase access to gender affirming care. We want to find ways to counter state efforts that are aimed at limiting such treatments. And Joe Biden says the following. Oh, and by the way, they want to come up with a sample school policy to achieve, quote, full inclusion of these students. And Joe Biden says the following. My message to all the young people, just be you.

You are loved. You are heard. You are understood. You do belong. Which really is just a bunch of nothing, because what we're trying to figure out is why are you having these feelings? It's not like your proposed solution must necessarily be correct. He skips right over the diagnosis part. Yeah, yeah. Everybody seems to know, but Joe Biden, that these underlying comorbid disorders, the ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, are the underlying cause for people going through this, whether it's even being affirmed and cross-dressed over a period of time by teachers and therapists telling them they can transition, I believe, is adverse childhood experience, because they're telling them they can do something that's impossible to do. And the studies, even Charles Illenfeld in 1979 that I spoke to said, I'm going to become a psychiatric doctor. Why? Because hormones and surgery don't work to help people. And so we've known this for a long time. You know, the United States hasn't caught up apparently. And, you know, even Biden put somebody at HHS who is obviously a man

identifying as a woman. And he himself has said he wants to transition kids at age eight. And so I think we're in kind of deep trouble here. And that's why I've said repeatedly, we're ruining an entire generation of children with this ideology. They don't need hormones. They don't need to transition. We need to find out what's causing them to have the feelings and focus on that treatment. And that's what I refer to as adverse childhood experiences or trauma. Is that Rachel Levine who you're referring to? Yeah. Okay. So let me ask you about this because we were talking about this yesterday. Demi Lovato, the singer,

just came out yesterday after saying that she wanted to be referred to as they, them for a year. Now she announced yesterday, I'm going to go by she, her. And I was talking about it

with some other journalists yesterday on some hits I did saying, yeah, I feel so uncomfortable about the whole thing. It kind of just puts the lie to the whole gender transition story, right? Like, do I have to change every year if she decides to go to he, him next year? Do I have to go? And am I a bigot

if I won't do it? And it's like, but I wrestle with it, guys, because I I've always gone by the pronouns of choice. I have not been somebody who has said you were born male. And if you transition to female, I'm not going to call you she her. I haven't been one of those people. But things like the Demi Lovato announcement are making me reconsider whether I've made the right choice. I notice you refer to Rachel Levine as he. So what do you make of that, Walt? And why do you use the male pronoun for somebody who says she? Well, you know, listen, I believe that they are who they are. And I don't believe you can change who you are. And I remember when I was Laura talking to a friend I'd known for 40 years, Bill.

And I said, hey, Bill, I'm now Laura. And you're going to have to use the right pronouns. And you're going to have to do all this. And Bill helped me understand this that day when I told him that. And he kind of rubbed his chin a little bit and he looked at me like Bill will do. And he says, OK, he said, I got your pronoun. I said, oh, good. He said, it's called wacko. And it actually didn't offend me. I started laughing my head off. And what I realize is that we who go through this are really trying to dictate

what people say and do. And we're not really telling the truth about who we are. And so I appreciated Bill and still do to this day telling me I was wacko. And so whether it's Rachel Levine or whoever it is, I found that I can carry on a conversation with you or anybody and never, ever use a pronoun. And that's what I do. I, you know, but if I'm talking about somebody that's not in the room with me, then I will refer to who I believe they are. How about you, Grace? Where do you fall on that? I've always used people's preferred pronouns.

I think that, you know, it's something that's personally meaningful to them and I try to be polite about it. And what's happened now in your life now that you've gone back to living your life as the woman that you are? What's happened with your family, with your friends and what's happened for you physically? Um, well, the detransition, um, luckily I wasn't on hormones for very long, so I'm able to pass. Well, I'm able to be recognized as female. I don't get mistaken for male. Um, I still have no breasts and that obviously will not change. It's been hard for me to get reconstructive surgery because insurance only pays for one direction of gender transition so far. That's what I've been told. So, yeah, so that's been difficult. I've just tried to move on with my life and also write about my

experiences. I really wanted to sort of extend a hand to other people who might be going through the same thing because I know it's enormously isolating. I write about that on my blog. Yeah. And you've formed a group to try to help people struggling with detransition or just the blowback of detransition. And what is that group? The Gender Care Consumers Advocacy Network is a group that I have with some of my colleagues where we just try to bring together information about transition and detransition and, you know, have it be a resource for people who are struggling with the kinds of issues that can come up, uh, when you're navigating the medical terrain. And what, what do you want raised? What do you want parents who are being told by their minor children? I'm trans, I'm trans. What do you want them to know?

Um, I think I want them to know that, you know, of course, like lead with love, like your child is still your child. But I would be, I would try to look for like therapists who are exploratory and not going to just have, you know, affirmation only like foregone conclusion that medical transition is the right thing. Because I think, especially when we're young people, our identities are pretty malleable and there's just no need to foreclose on an identity with irreversible and harmful medical procedures without giving people time to explore what it really means to them and the underlying causes. Yeah. Because if you just pick a random psychologist or psychiatrist, they're being told

by their organizations, affirm, affirm, affirm, affirm, and not to affirm immediately is quote, conversion therapy. So you do have to be very careful in selecting the therapist. Otherwise, you're setting your kid down a path that you may not want and he or she may not need. Well, same closing question for you. What do you want people to know, like parents who are thinking about this or kids who are wrestling with it as a result of society shoving it down their throat? Yeah, I want the parents to really consider strongly taking their child if they're struggling with this to a trauma therapist who deals with adverse

childhood experiences and have them do a complete study to evaluate the amount of trauma they may have experienced and see if there's underlying comorbid issues like body dysmorphia, dissociative disorder, schizophrenia, or whatever it may be, and treat those disorders and not opt for the idea of hormones and surgery. And in that way, the person will not be replacing the knee and actually dealing with the real issues. And I think that's so important today to prevent those children who would be better off served by adverse childhood experience and trauma therapy than going through hormones and surgery that are absolutely devastating and will last a lifetime. Wow. I could spend three hours with you guys. Thank you both so much for being here,

for telling your stories. And I hope we can do it again because there's something new on this issue virtually every week. I'm really proud to know you. I appreciate you being here. Thank you. It's our pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. All the best. Up next, we're getting into the issues of puberty blockers, cross-gender hormones, and what the medical community has done here, the absolute abdication of its responsibilities with two doctors, one of whom is trans, and you'll hear all sides represented. Joining me now, two doctors, pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason and clinical psychologist Dr. Erica Anderson. Dr. Anderson is a transgender woman as well. Thank you both so much for being here.

There's a lot to go through. And just preparing for the segment, what I found very eye-opening was puberty blockers. I mean, they talk about putting kids on puberty blockers today. Like they're not sure if they're a girl or a boy. You can put them on the puberty blockers, delay the decision, you know, as if it's nothing.

And reading up on this in depth for the first time, it is not nothing. Puberty blockers do have real risks. Julia, can you outline what some of them are? Sure. Puberty blockers are medicines that shut down the production of all the sex steroids. So estrogen, progestin, testosterone, all of them. And the sex steroids are important in adolescent development. This will start as young as age eight or nine in girls and nine or 10 in boys. The use of puberty blockers has been associated with significant bone density problems, even in kids who were administered puberty blockers for the treatment of precocious puberty. And I want to mention that precocious puberty is treated with puberty blockers. For example, a girl at age five or six might get a Lupron implant. But if a girl seems to be starting puberty at age seven, the current recommendation is not to use puberty blockers because the side effects are too significant. But there have been case reports of bone problems.

Bone density. Okay. So you can wind up with, I was reading in your backtalk with our, interview with our producer, report of spinal fractures, subsequent chronic pain in a young patient given puberty blockers in Sweden. I mean, these are things that are just not that well known. And there's a question about whether they can inhibit brain development and also potentially affect sexual attraction. Is that true, Julia? Yeah. So the development of desire is mediated by the sex steroid hormones. And if you've blocked them, then you've also blocked that development in the child. And this is significant because over the past 40 years, as you've already said, the majority of gender dysphoric small children were male. And a lot of them had their gender dysphoria

dissipate with the onset of puberty as they slowly came to realize that they were gay. This wasn't a hundred percent, but this was the most common outcome. And if you block the puberty, you block that development. Wow. And so you just leave them sort of confused and not understanding why they're confused, but just chalking it up to the gender dysphoria. Whereas if they had just been allowed to go through normal puberty, they would have realized, oh, I do have an attraction. It's, you know, more than likely to guys. I'm just gay. I'm not trans. Yeah. And there have been multiple case reports of a loss of IQ points and kids being held back a grade because they had such sort of brain fog brought on by the puberty blockers. If you give them to a girl who's

already started her periods, you're going to put her into an immediate sort of violent menopause. It's a lot worse than when you undergo menopause naturally through your 50s. It's all at once. And I've heard from young people who had to get the puberty blocker removed after six months because they just couldn't think they were having constant hot flashes, which sounds bad. Yeah, it sounds bad at our age, never mind a young age. What about the question of orgasm? I've seen people raise an issue about whether puberty blockers somehow will inhibit a child's later ability to achieve orgasm. Right. Just like sex hormones are responsible for the development of sexual desire and thus allow children to sort of figure out if they're straight or gay, sex hormones also lead to the development of masturbation and the discovery of orgasm. And if, I mean, we have

Marcy Bowers saying to other doctors in a conference that of all her patients, you know, natal males who were blocked at the very beginning of puberty, before they had had an orgasm, none of them have achieved orgasm. Wow, she was featured in Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman? Dr. Marcy Bowers, if memory serves. I mean, what's disturbing to me is that these risks just don't get disclosed.

It's so easy if you wanna get puberty blockers in today's day and age, it's certainly in the blue states. You know. I mean, the red states are trying to crack down on this a bit more. They'll just give them to you. They'll just say, great. It gives you a little postponement of having to make this decision. And I don't think a lot of parents understand these risks, lower IQ, possibly no more orgasms for your young child in his or her life. And just a lot of confusion and risks that you didn't know you were taking. Bone density, and that's really important

to stay well for the rest of your life. Erica, how do you see it? Because obviously you have a personal connection to this issue in a way. And I know that this is not, I know it's not considered correct to say you were born a biological male. So I'm not trying to offend you.

I'm just trying to keep things straight. You were born and labeled a male at birth. You transitioned to female. So how do you see it? Because the issue with children is particularly dicey. Right. Well, thanks for having me. And these are complicated subjects, as we can all agree. I have a fairly nuanced perspective about this. And sometimes I'm accused and found guilty of being in the middle on some of these issues. The worst thing you can possibly be on anything today. So I see the problems. But I also, as you point out earlier, Megan, there are transgender people, and there always have been. And so my sincere obligation is to help all transgender people. now by possibly the promotion of trans identities in various ways, social media, you know, in circles of young people. And I've been speaking about it for several years. And during the pandemic, a number of things happened. It was kind of like a perfect storm with kids deprived of being with each other at school, they ended up at home doing Zoom school and have found themselves online in larger and larger numbers per day than ever before.

And the consumption of all this social media that is speaking to them, I think has really been unhealthy. So I've been writing and speaking about the potential that we may have a new group of particularly teenagers who don't fit the model that we've seen in the outcomes research that's been published in the journals and is based in Europe, particularly the Netherlands and Sweden, and even the United States. And so if we have a new group of adolescents who didn't exhibit any gender questioning when they were young, unlike the more traditional group that we've seen in gender clinics, what do we know? And I think that's the problem is there are a lot of questions. So I've been urging caution. The standard of practice actually is urging individualized evaluation of every child rather than expedited treatment with hormones. And I've been a bit of a contrarian because there certainly are a lot of people in my work and in the trans community who just think everybody who says they're trans is trans and you should take them at their word. of everything I know is 40 years of psychologist about self-report, which is really not reliable,

and about the challenges of kids who are exploring their identity in all ways that we know. Yeah. And I mean, of course, transitioning is not easy. It's not easy physically, emotionally, even intellectually, I'm sure it poses new challenges. And so it's like, why wouldn't we pump the brakes and say, let's be absolutely sure before we help this child go through something extremely traumatic. Even today, Barry Weiss over at Common Sense had a piece a couple of days ago about how we may be getting a little bit more reluctant to push people into transitioning. And she talked about how the, she wrote about the closing down of, is it the Tavistock Clinic over in the UK? Yeah. And they just said that this has caused

too much damage to young people and we're not proceeding appropriately or with enough caution. But here in the United States, and the piece was critical of the American Academy of Pediatrics here, which is all about gender affirming, gender affirming, Julia. And just today, as we were coming on the air, the Daily Mail dropped a piece, American Academy of Pediatrics holding its leadership conference in Chicago this week. And they are blocking efforts to review, according to the Daily Mail, their policy on gender affirming care for teens who say they identify as transgender. They're not interested in reviewing their current policies, which are definitely on the side of affirming. What do you make of it? as you pointed out earlier, to the actions taken by the health authorities in the UK,

the National Health Service, and the health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and France, who have undertaken serious study about all the phenomenon we're talking about is like, are there, why is it that there are so many kids who are questioning their gender and showing up at gender clinics in numbers we've never seen before. What do we make of that? What about the shift in the population from predominantly male kids who are presenting at gender clinics to more than two-thirds female? And this is a finding that's been true in the United States. All the gender clinics that I'm familiar with. I worked in one of the best known and the clinics in Sweden. So in Sweden, they have pushed the pause button and said, we need to study this. they came out with their decision because they're known as a very progressive society who has been very welcoming of trans identities for many, many years.

And they're the first country in the world that recognized harm done to trans people and actually created reparations for people who were involuntarily sterilized. So Sweden has taken the lead, as they have in other things. And I'm happy. I'm a little disturbed that our colleagues in the United States, and I think Dr. Mason probably feels the same way, that they've ignored what's been going on in Europe. They've ignored the new caution, the new judgments that have been made and seem to be going about the business

of doing what they've been doing for a few years. But the voices of those of us who have expressed caution, concern, are being heard now more than ever. And so I'm hopeful that we're about to see the tide turn. Julia, this reminds me of what happened with the COVID dosing, where Europe said, definitely we want vaccines are good and we want to make them available for kids. But here's what we think is safe based on our studies. Less, they don't need the 30, I can't remember the unit, micrograms, whatever it is. We can go with 10 for the littles

and only one shot is really required. We don't need two or whatever. They've just been sort of open-minded to data that would allow them to reassess earlier assumptions. And then they go with data and evidence. Whereas our pediatrics officials seem agenda driven like this. I don't understand, given what happened at Tavistock and given the Sweden and the Finland and the UK studies, why we wouldn't be saying over here for the good of these children, let's reassess, let's slow down, let's change our approach. It's not that we're going to be condemning or cruel or converting. We're going to be open-minded to, as our earlier guest was saying, other childhood traumas that may be confusing one particular child or another. I believe that five years ago, they were approached by young activists who said, you know, trans is the new gay, it's the new civil rights movement, and you need to get on the right side of history, and you need to do the right thing. And they just wrote up that 2018 statement. And as far as I can tell, there were no adults looking at, no experienced clinicians looking at that statement. As soon as it came out, James Cantor, who is a sexologist, you know, took a look and said, wait a second, these references don't say what you're implying they say.

The 2018 statement said that there's three possibilities for dealing with a child who declares a cross-sex identity. You can attempt conversion therapy, you can do watchful waiting, or you can do affirmative care. And the only ethical and proper thing to do is affirmative care. But when they talked about conversion therapy, they were referencing studies about conversion therapy for homosexuality in adults. Right. Right. Totally different therapy for kids. Gender identity is not a thing. No. And yet we have I was just saying to the earlier guests that we we have a biden administration executive order saying we need to ban conversion therapy in all states in the context of trans kids like what is he talking about like i yeah i don't know it's not a thing they're talking about it's yeah it's it's not a thing um and watchful waiting didn't mean that

you just put them in a box watch Watchful meeting meant support the Dutch. Okay. So most of this is based on some studies by Dutch researchers. They were the first ones to have this idea of giving puberty blockers to kids. And when they were doing theirs, they were trying very hard to isolate the children whose cross sex identity persisted into puberty. And they told the parents, don't change the name, don't change the pronouns, don't tell them, oh, you really are a girl. If a mother referred to their kid as their daughter, they'd say, no, you have a son,

and possibly when they're older, we'll do some cosmetic procedures to help them, you know, live their life more comfortably. But they really didn't want to do early social transition. And yet people have taken that research and turned it into this idea that a child's gender identity is internal, eternal, and immutable. And if they tell you that's what they are, then that's what they are. And I've been a pediatrician for over 25 years and kids identify as lots of things when they're kids. I thought it was a magical witch named Taffian. I had a patient who insisted he was a cat for two years. He was very insistent about the cat thing. Yeah.

And generally, I think that if a boy wants to wear the sparkly, you know, the sparkly nail polish and the dresses, we should let him wear the sparkly nail polish and the dresses. It's awesome. Yeah. That doesn't mean he's a girl. I mean, let him have some time. If I might, I think one of the issues in addition to the ones Dr. Mason's talking about,

which is reliance on research on a different population to support earlier intervention with teenagers, which I don't think can be justified on that basis, that we have some interesting developments in terms of culture. We've gotten away from the binary construction of gender. A lot of people accept sort of a spectrum of genders, but in this arena, there's been almost a renewed policing of gender that the girls who we would have referred to as tomboys are encouraged to think maybe they're in the wrong gender, maybe they're trans boys, and the effeminate boys are suggested that perhaps their gender is really female. are gay professionals who say, are we actually policing out of existence gay identities,

proto-gay identities? That was a big subject for the initial screening from the gender clinics in Europe, as Dr. Mason is pointing out. And I'm concerned that rather than be more accepting of gender expression and gender exploration, we're less so. And I agree with Dr. Mason that we should be tolerating all kinds of differences and not presuming that it has to do with gender. A lot of our teenagers are getting some really inappropriate advice saying that if your preferences line up with stereotypically the other gender, maybe that's true for you, as opposed to just saying you're atypical or you're nonconforming. I picked up on the use of the word nonconforming earlier, Megan, and one of the things that's

interesting to me is that's been policed out of our dialogue. We don't use that word gender nonconforming anymore in any of the professional literature. We should use it. I mean, why wouldn't we call somebody who is unique or idiosyncratic unique and idiosyncratic? Doesn't mean that we change their gender. And we know, we know know it's not saying there's only one way to look and be female or look or be when we say like those people are conforming. It's not like, oh, yes, this is what it's just a way of identifying what we've traditionally understood to look and be female and male. One of the things that jumped out at me in reading your thoughts on this prior to air, Julia, was you were saying there are some boys concerned

about toxic masculinity who are now struggling with gender. I mean, that's incredible to me. We always sort of joke about that term because it's like, I don't know. It's not that we really love toxicity, but I mean, a lot of us love masculinity in our men and we don't want effeminate men if we're straight women i mean a lot of us feel that way i feel that way but i never thought that it was it was a problem that would affect somebody's gender identity to me to me and i want you to expand on this but to me that's sort of the flop of the flip of girls you know being told you're gonna get me too'd you're gonna get you know sex discriminated against you're to be treated as the weaker sex. And they're like, well, screw this. I'm crossing over. What are my other options? Right. It's sort of the same, but on the boy side. gentle, sweet boys who sometimes growing up in an environment without any positive male figures,

like their mother had an abusive partner and they, you know, and they live in a very female centered world. And all they hear about is toxic masculinity and that men are aggressive and that men cause pain and harm. And they're just sort of horrified by that. And they're like, I don't want to male, and they don't see a way forward as they're growing into being a man. I agree. And I think that the conflation of sort of social justice wokeness with advice about gender makes it confusing for a lot of, certainly a lot of young males, in that, you know, they don't want to be associated with toxic masculinity. They don't want to be associated with white male privilege that has served to oppress all minorities and colonize, you know, the indigenous populations. So it is a between a rock and a hard place. I'm in the Bay Area, and there are a lot of schools that are very progressive. And some do it very well to bring up

some of these issues. And some create such an environment that I literally have had parents call me and say, our boys came home from school today crying that they learned that they were the problem with humanity. And I think that's a terrible message to convey to boys in particular. My gosh, it's so disturbing. So what, I mean, I want to get to what you should do, but let me ask you this question, because we talked about puberty blockers, Julia, but we didn't talk about cross sex hormones. And that's I don't that seems to be a much bigger deal than the puberty blockers. So like the cross sex hormones, as I understand it, if you go if you're a young girl who says, I think I'm actually a boy and I want to start looking like and acting like a boy and you go on puberty blockers into cross sex hormones, you're infertile. You, that cannot be undone. So, I mean, it's,

it's 10 out of 10 severe in terms of your life decisions. Yeah. Um, if, uh, if a child is put on puberty blockers at Tanner 2, which is literally like the first pubic hair, you know, like they still look like a child. Tanner 2, is that what you said? Tanner, sorry. Yeah. The Tanner staging, kids are Tanner 1 until they start puberty. And then Tanner 2 is the most subtle of changes. And it goes to 5. You know, it's a scale that we use. And the current protocol is to put kids on puberty blocker at Tanner 2 and thus stop puberty altogether. Then the gonads don't develop.

And we actually have so little information about what happens if a kid is put on puberty blockers for gender dysphoria and then stops them. I mean, we're told that it's a harmless pause and everything will resume. And we're basing that on our experience with much younger children who are given this for precocious puberty. But I have been unable to find any, any good data. It's, you know, one of the problems with the Tavistock is they seem to be deliberately not collecting any information. Um, so, uh, I lost my train of thought anyway. So the, the sterility is likely, yeah, sterility is likely because the gonads don't develop.

The testosterone. This may be a dumb question, but I know we both have gametes and women have gametes that produce eggs. And that's what makes us female. And men have them that produce sperm. And that's what makes them male. But like when I was I was asking, for example, about girls, like biological girls. And you use the term gonads so do we have you know do we have some sort of gonad internally a gonad gonads are ovaries and testicles okay okay so got it so actually yeah i'm sorry i'm using too much data gonads produce gametes so ovaries produce eggs and testicles produce sperm. And pre-pubic blockers block the development of both the ovaries and the testicles, depending on who you are.

Then the testosterone starts a cascade of physical effects that are almost entirely irreversible. So if a natal female takes testosterone long enough to develop a beard, even if she stops the testosterone, she's going to have that beard for the rest of her life. If the testosterone leads to her vocal cords thickening, she's either going to have a deep voice or she's going to have a really tight, froggy voice. And I'm curious as to how we know which one's going to happen. But that will also persist for the rest of her life. If a female is using testosterone for more than a few years, they typically develop vaginal atrophy. I have a patient who developed stress

incontinence. So whenever he coughed or laughed, pee would leak out. And that was just because the tissues of the urethra were getting kind of thin and frail like a postmenopausal woman. And it's generally recommended that if a person takes testosterone for more than five years, that they should get a hysterectomy because there's an increased risk of infection and cancer and painful orgasms. Oh my goodness. That's like the worst nightmare. To another issue, if I might. Sure. We're talking a lot about medical things, but one of the concerns I've expressed as a psychologist is that too many health professionals in the USA are going right to the medical interventions

and not pausing sufficiently at the evaluation of what's going on with the kids. And I think Walt, in your earlier segment, was stressing that, as was Grace, for that matter, that we've abdicated in some circles the proper evaluation, individualized evaluation, and we can't do that. The standard of practice is to do that kind of evaluation and we will never really know what all might be conflated with gender unless we do that kind of evaluation. So there are too many providers in the USA who want to just expedite medicalization. I've been decrying this for actually three or four years. I've seen it happen. I get calls from parents all the time who say they went to a gender clinic and in 15, 20 minutes, they were told, well, here's how we go on hormones.

No mental health evaluation. I think it's just deplorable. So I've got a lot of flack from colleagues for calling others out on this issue, but it's really, really important. So Eric, if you were advising President Biden, you know, let's throw out that executive order and start anew. What would you tell him? Like, what should we be doing differently? Well, there are trans people. There are persistent trans identities and they're found among young people as well. And the challenge for us is differentiating those who are gender questioning from those who are persistently transgender. I think that's a

psychological differentiation, not a medical one. We as yet don't have any laboratory tests to differentiate who will ultimately go on to persist. And we do have a new group, I'm afraid, of teenagers who have looked to medicalization, it was presumed 50 years ago that anyone who had a trans identity had a deep-seated psychiatric disorder. No longer. But the group of teenagers that we're seeing in huge numbers now that we didn't see before are those who've been coached to think that changing your gender is the solution to all your problems. I can assure you it is not. And so we have lots of kids who are potentially susceptible to this and might end up, as Grace did, believing that, you know, gender transition will make them happy. And unfortunately, it's not going to happen. I'll give you the last word on it, Julia.

Same question. You know, what needs to change? What would you advise? Well, I guess I would say the same thing that I had in my resolution I submitted to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is that we need to undertake a systematic review of the scientific evidence for these treatments. This is what they did in Finland and Sweden and England, and this is what led to them pumping the brakes on pediatric medical transition. A systematic review is a particular thing, and it means that you look at all the data, not just the data that you like the results of. That's been put in front of you by activists who have an agenda, but that may not be linked to facts. You guys, thank you both so much. Julia, Erica, I really appreciate both of you being here. Again, Dr. Julia Mason, Dr. Erica Anderson, very thoughtful and very heartfelt. And I am very grateful.

All the best. Thank you. Wow, what a show. I loved all four of our guests today. I hope you feel the same. What a thoughtful discussion. Oh, it's such a tricky wicket. And the mainstream is going against the side of reason. The side of reason.

What they're doing to these kids is not loving. It's not supportive. It's not fostering wellness. To the contrary. And the rest of us are going to have to get big and bold and brave about pushing back or we're complicit. I'm very grateful. I mean, I really respect our guests. And look at Erica. I'm sure Erica does get a lot of pushback, but comes out publicly and talks about this in the most thoughtful way. Very grateful. Anyway, give me your thoughts. Go to the Apple podcast reviews. I read them all. You can email me at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. And I have very exciting news about tomorrow. Dr. Laura is back. Cannot wait to talk to her. I have so many issues as you know, but I want to get your issues in front of her too. So be prepared to tune in live. And if you miss it live and listen to us via podcast or on youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly later. Thank you as always for listening.