Theology in the Raw - 747: #747 - A Journalist Explores Transgender Related Questions: A Conversation with Madeleine Kearns

Episode Date: July 8, 2019

On episode #747 of Theology in the Raw Preston has a conversation with Madeleine Kearns. Madeleine has written several articles on the politics of the transgender conversation, in particular how it has affected children. Some of the things she’s discovered are downright disturbing. https://madeleinekearns.com Some articles by Madeleine The Trans Child As Experimental Guinea Pig How Parents Are Being Shut Out of the Transgender Debate Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I want to let you know about a few upcoming speaking engagements. On September 5th, I will be in Indianapolis, Indiana, for a one-day leaders forum on sexuality and gender. September 16th and 17th, I'll be in Fort Wayne, Indiana, talking about sexuality and gender. On September 23rd and 24th, I'll be in Richmond, Virginia, talking about, you guessed it, sexuality and gender on September 23rd and 24th. I'll be in Richmond, Virginia talking about, you guessed it, sexuality and gender. I'll be in New York City on September 27th and 28th. Also talking about sexuality and gender, October 8th and October 9th in Colorado Springs and

November 5th in Minneapolis, Minnesota. All of these are events connected with the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender, which is why I'm talking about faith, sexuality, and gender. You can go to centerforfaith.com and check out these events in more detail. And you need to register for these events through our website, centerforfaith.com. So if you want to attend one of these events, some of these events, all of these events, then you have to go and register. And I would highly recommend doing that sooner than later, especially for the events in September. They do tend to fill up.

And in some cases, there's only room for, you know, 250, maybe 300 people or whatever. And so they do, sometimes they do fill up. So if you do want to attend these events, then I would highly recommend registering sooner than later. Okay, my guest for today, I'm so excited about this interview. Her name is Madeline Kearns. Sorry, Madeline. Madeline Kearns. Sorry, Madeline. Madeline Kearns. Madeline Kearns is a, she's a journalist who's written some really provocative articles recently. She's a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow

in Political Journalism at National Review. She's contributed to The Spectator. She's been published in The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Scotsman. She's been, she's appeared on BBC World Service and other news outlets, media outlets. She has a master's degree in New York University. I came across her articles because she has written several articles on the political side of the transgender conversation. And one article in particular I have in front of me, I read it a couple of times. It's titled The Trans Child as Experimental Guinea Pig. And she is incredibly thorough in her research. She's a very good writer. And she is courageous because she is writing things that go against what mainstream media outlets, some mainstream or many mainstream media outlets, say that you should or can write about. She pushes back against political correctness,

but she does so very graciously and very thoughtfully. And so I was so stoked when I reached out to her on Twitter and said, Madeline, I don't know you, you don't know me, but I would love to talk with you on my podcast. And she said, sure. So I am so excited with this conversation. Let me just give one quick qualification on this interview. As you know, if you've listened to my podcast for any number of months or, you know, anything about my ministry, you know, that I have a huge heart for LGBTQ people. I also have a huge heart for the truth of scripture and what it says about sexuality and gender. Now the transgender conversation is incredibly complex. It involves theological conversations. It involves ethical conversations. It involves biblical studies and understanding

history and understanding interpretation and translation, different translations of the Bible. It involves psychology, it involves psychiatry, it involves politics and pastoral relationships, and just on and on and on it goes. Now, we can never do injustice to the entire complexity of this conversation by simply focusing on one slice of that huge pie. But we have to, it's inevitable. Whenever you talk about transgender related questions, it's not like you can cover everything all the time, every time you open your mouth and talk about it. every time you open your mouth and talk about it. So just to give you just, just to, just to preface this conversation, our specific focus in this interview is on the, some of the politics of, if I can say trans activist ideologies that have trickled its way all the way down into,

I mean, politics, but also like our school system and media outlets and so on and so forth. Like that is a significant piece of this conversation. Now, so we don't talk about pastoral care. We don't talk about psychological complexity. We don't talk about ethics or theology. We are just focusing on the political aspect of this conversation. So for some of you, that may be triggering. I know I've got some listeners who may struggle with gender dysphoria. Maybe you identify as trans and maybe all you've heard is the political side of this conversation. And so maybe this might be a troubling conversation for you. So I just want to at least warn you ahead of time that we are

simply focusing on one aspect of this very complex conversation. And yeah, I do believe it's a very, it is a very important aspect of this conversation. So without further ado, I'm so excited about, I'm so excited for you to get to know the Madeline Kearns. Okay, I am here with, I'm just going to say my new friend, Madeline Kearns, who is a really interesting journalist, as I said in the introduction. Madeline, thanks so much for being on this podcast. Thanks so much for having me. It's been a pleasure already. And I can tell from your accent that you are from New York. Is that correct? I did you guess, yes. No, I'm not. I'm from Glasgow, Scotland.

Yeah. And currently living in New York. Currently living in New York. Okay. So I came across your name, I would say maybe it might have been about six months ago, or maybe even sooner than that. The one article that I have holding in my hands right now is titled The Trans Child as Experimental Guinea Pig. I want to talk about that article, but you first got into writing about gender, transgender-related topics in the wake of Lisa Lippman's, I'm going to say, controversial study. I read the study a couple times.

I felt like it was just straightforward scholarship. I thought it was well done, but produced a bunch of backlash and controversy. You want to start there? Because that's kind of how you got into writing about transgender related topics. Give us the background on that whole story and how it erupted. Absolutely. So, yeah, so I was I just started my job at National Review and I'd written a bit in the past about academic freedom, free speech, that kind of

thing, especially as it relates to research and scholarship and I came across this Lisa Littman, medical doctor, research assistant at Brown University who published this paper on transgender youth and what she perceived to be a possible social and peer contagion, especially affecting, I think, young girls. And I wasn't really so much interested in the content of her study at that point, more the surrounding issues. And I wanted to know why, for instance, the university had bowed to backlash because this study had offended people within the trans community allegedly and had

removed it from their website and it really it just seemed to cause a huge stir the study and so I looked into it and I started putting at the end of my articles on anything to do with transgenderism if you've been affected by this issue please contact me i'd be interested in hearing from you and before long my inbox was just flooded with messages from doctors trans people parents uh all sorts really a very broad church of people who really were saying the same thing which is something's going on here and we're very scared and we're very scared to talk about it and everybody was requesting anonymity which now I kind of understand because having written about this I've faced some of this myself right um so so it just it just made me realize that there was a real need for serious reporting on this issue in a way that the mainstream media just simply

is not fulfilling. What was the fear? I mean, you got a diverse array of, you said doctors, trans people, parents, gay people, whatever, all across the political, religious, ethical spectrum. But the main concern was, again, just the inability to kind of raise questions about a particular narrative. Is that the gist of it? Yeah, I mean, different people had different reasons to be worried. So parents had reason to be worried because their child might be in the process of transitioning. And if the child knew that they were not fully on board, that might damage the relationship.

Doctors had reason to be worried because they could potentially run into problems professionally some doctors have been fired in some places you know teachers similar thing like using the wrong pronouns that's enough to get you fired in Virginia apparently and so it was it was mainly this sort of like political backlash that people were fearing I suppose very much what had happened to lisa litman it would be a good illustration i mean there were people calling for her to be fired and calling her every name under the sun and actually if you if you speak to her she's just a very mild-mannered progressively minded person who has written fairly dispassionate research actually yeah yeah uh so so there was so the the fear was was palpable and and i would say it's because of the the politics of the issue right i'm gonna uh set this up and

i'll toss it to you to fill in fill in the gaps here but so to for our audience lisa litman is a professor at brown university uh no you no bastion for conservative. It's not a conservative think tank nor a religious institution. And so she would be a self-proclaimed, I mean, liberal, progressive, you know, but she did a study, the first study of its kind on teenagers who experienced what psychologists have called rapid onset gender dysphoria. Now that's kind of when you hear that phrase, if you're not, if you've never heard that phrase before, you're probably like, you know, a deer caught in the headlights. It's like, what does that even mean? Well, there is a growing phenomenon. It's growing. I mean, some people describe it as an epidemic of

specifically teenage girls almost overnight identifying as trans with no prior evidence that they experienced what psychologists would call gender dysphoria. And so this is, this is something that's kind of well known in the community that's, you know, deals with gender clinics and, and gender identity or sorry, gender dysphoria. So Lisa Littman just did a study on parents who have experienced this kind of phenomenon and has shown, or, you know, I don't want to say argued, but observed that there seems to be some sort of social, possible social contagion that is playing a role in specifically teenage females questioning their sex or gender, however you want to frame it.

So that's how I want to set it up. Do you want to take it from there and maybe unpack more of that study and why it was so controversial? Yeah, so the first thing to say about Lippman's study is it really was a preliminary study. So the term rapid onset gender dysphoria is useful insofar as it's the first time somebody seriously in an academic context come up with a name or a term to refer to. It's not an official medical diagnosis, nor did Lipman claim it was.

But as you say, she was responding to, she was observing rather a trend. She was observing, rather, a trend. And now the data on the transgender youth population is lacking, especially in the United States. But we do know sort of anecdotally, looking at the cluster effect, that this is mainly affecting girls. In fact, in the UK, where there's only one main gender youth clinic, I think it's 4,000, there's been a 4,000% increase in less than a decade in the number of girls

identifying as transgender and seeking medical assistance with that. So she obviously, she tapped into something that a lot of people were experiencing. And she, again, very carefully. And as, as a first step called she called for further research uh she just said you know could this be to do with the fact that a lot of these kids are spending a lot of time online could it be to do with the fact that a lot of these kids are in the same peer group who are coming out as trans and and she said you know i think social

and peer contagion is possibly you know one many factors, because as we know about gender confusion, it is very complicated and very case by case. And this was enough to really just inspire such fierce backlash. is that she had inadvertently undermined a key activist dogma, which is that gender identity, that is one sense of being male or female, is immutable and innate and cannot be questioned and cannot be challenged. And within the context of the medical profession as a whole, that is more and more where we're headed with this stuff so i don't know if you saw but the world health organization recently removed um transgenderism or rather gender dysphoria from a list of mental disorders

the effect of that essentially is that we're moving towards a mode of self-declaration. Right. So it's not that you're feeling confused. It's that you are literally in the wrong body. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't really think of many other situations where we would have a person, let alone a child, go in to a medical professional, say, here's what I am, here's what the issue is, here's what the treatment should be. And there being no objective measurement for diagnosis, then everybody going along with that.

I mean, it really is extraordinary. And this is where the dividing line within people who I would identify and I think they would self-identify as liberal or even progressive, but there's a big debate within that group of people who would be very much okay with adults transitioning if they want to, identifying however they want to. But the big dividing line is when it comes to children, especially when we've seen such complexity surrounding this.

I mean, if a 25, 30, 35 year old wants to make a decision, it's a free country, do what you want. That doesn't mean I have to embrace the ideology that you are, you know, embracing to make that decision. But I can it's a free country. You do what you want and I should respect you and humanize you. But when it comes to children and this is kind of, I guess, transitioning to this other article you wrote about, you know, the trans child as an experimental guinea pig. child as an experimental guinea pig. It is, this is where within liberal communities, a massive debate, you know, and even people like, you know, J. Michael Bailey or Ken Zucker, Susan Bradley, some of the, you know, medical experts who would say, hey, look, if you want to transition, then we can help you with that. But for a child or a teenager to be kind of pressured into this,

or a parent of a child being pressured into it without any sort of alternative examination of possible ways forward, that's when I think that seems to be where the big, you know, crux is in this debate. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, look, I think for most people, this would be a kind of fringe issue that they wouldn't really wade into. I mean, why would they affect or at least it used to affect such a tiny number of people. So, you know, lots of people have reservations about sex change treatments and how you go about that, both within the medical profession and outside. But that is a relatively sort of contained debate or at least it was but you're absolutely right I think the the the children is just where most people have to draw a line because I mean obviously

it's sort of commonsensical if you have any experience whatsoever working with children you know that they change their minds frequently that they're very susceptible to influence that they're very susceptible to what their friends are doing they're very sensitive to trends and fashions and all that sort of thing and also no you know there's an element of like wanting attention and things like that so I think it's just, it's kind of for a lot of people, a no brainer that the conversation we're having about adults is just a completely different one than the one we're having about kids. What kind of harm have you seen in your investigations and journalism and writings and everything that some harm that has been done to children? Do you have like

examples or have you seen a lot oh sure yeah oh my goodness how long have you got um yeah no it's it's quite grim actually the more you look into it so i mean well first of all i would say that i've i've met young people who have had irreversible treatments um and and now regret it so i mean a young woman who had her breasts removed um i think either she was 17 or she was 18 i can't quite remember but there's there's um there's no hard and fast rule that that children in the united young people in the united states cannot have sex reassignment surgery. So it depends on the state, basically. I thought it was, it's not 18 or 16 or... So the recommendation,

the recommendation for the WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, is the age of legal majority in any given country. But in the United States, that is 18, as you know. But it really depends on the state. So there are, in New Yorkork new hampshire and uh vermont i'm pretty sure um you can have sex reassignment surgery like whenever like really there's there's no there yeah there's no limit and uh and also there's we know in california

there's studies been done of of girls as young as 13 having had double mastectomies. That's their healthy breast. This isn't like a sensational, like, I mean, this is actual. This is, yeah. In fact, you can look up the study, anyone who's listening, if they don't believe me. It's by Joanna Olson Kennedy. Yeah. And I think it's called chest reconstruction or something like that in transgender youth but yeah at least um yeah

there's there's in that particular study i think there's two or three 13 year olds and four or five uh 14 year olds that took part in the study um we know a dr mike laidlaw who's a great great guy on this stuff um out in california he requested a freedom information request for an nih study uh also partly happening in in california where uh the progress report shows that children as young as eight have been put on cross-sex hormones and these are these are sterilizing uh these are sterilizing drugs so um so i mean to answer your question in a more succinct way, I'd say the harms are potentially sterility, sexual dysfunction, regret and an increase of gender dysphoria. talked about enough is the incredible damage this does to families and to parent-child relationships if a child is told that their parent doesn't love them or support them because they're not jumping at the chance to turn them into the opposite sex I mean these these are all so

there's the physical harms and then there's just the social and psychological harms it's really extraordinary and the other thing i would i would add to that is i mean oftentimes this is happening in the context of children who are already very very vulnerable so there's a disproportionate representation of autistic children in in those who identifies transgender um that's partly you know prone to black and white thinking and that sort of thing there the the was a recent expose of, again, using this as an example, because we don't have enough data in the US at the moment, but in the UK, the main gender youth clinic,

there was an expose done by the Times of London, which showed that some of the doctors there were complaining that some of these kids had been sexually abused. some of these kids had been sexually abused and some of them had parents who who you know were perceived to be actually like sort of homophobic so in a way it was a sort of strange rather literal conversion therapy where the little boy is very effeminate and we don't want him to be homosexual so we'll turn him into a girl and actually you know in countries like iran uh that is actually how they deal with homosexuality is by making transsexualism uh an option yes so there's um i mean the harms are

just endless so real quick i can't let the last point go because that's fascinating. You're saying that it's in a very roundabout way. It's some people would encourage transitioning for their child. And it's almost stemming from a internalized homophobia. I don't want them to be a gay man. So I'll turn them into a woman. Wow.

Yes, I think that's a huge part of it. And actually, you know, that can be a huge part of it and actually you know that that can be so it can also be you know that the person's family and environment can be sort of homophobic and think this is a way of dealing with it but it can also be the person themselves i mean they might not have reconciled the fact that they are sexually attracted to the same sex or whatever and they think well wouldn't it just be easier if I were um a boy or girl and then you know these are these are very complicated things and I don't I don't I don't want to suggest that it's a it's a sort of like very simple thought

process but it's certainly that has that has been picked up by by quite a number of clinicians um and and also you know we know historically that that a lot of transsexuals um are especially transsexual females so that's female to males are um are gay are sexually attracted to the same sex so so yeah a very vulnerable population already i would say what what do you um what do you make of the lack of free speech, academic freedom in this conversation? I mean, in most other areas of academic research, scientific study, you know, there's platforms and avenues to have different perspectives. And, you know, I mean, in this conversation, there seems to be such an inability for people to have the freedom to just even question out loud or raise hard questions against a certain kind of narrative.

I mean, can I just assume you would say, yes, that's very much true? Yeah, no, I would absolutely agree with that. And to develop the point, I'm going to give the most charitable interpretation of this as possible. Because, you know, conservatives love nothing more than to harp on about how they don't get to speak on campuses. But what I think it is, ultimately, is that this is essentially like a philosophical point, right? this is essentially like a philosophical point, right? And as with much of the LGBT movement, but especially with the T,

there is something fundamentally ontological about it, right? It's how a person defines themselves. So, you know, Christians or Jews or whatever would define themselves as, you know, created by God or whatever. And I think for the transgender philosophy it's it's kind of like a it's like a form of like cartesian dualism where you know the mind and the body and so by disagreeing with the somebody's proclaimed gender identity you're actually challenging them in a very existential way um and uh and sort of not giving them as this is how it's perceived uh any right to exist right

right and denying their existence denying their humanity now of course that that's not really how the other side see it because it's like i might might not accept that you're a female, but I still think you're a human being with all the same rights and privileges and dignity as everybody else. But I just don't agree that you're a female. And this only actually becomes a problem when you start expecting to be treated like a female in certain situations. And the way, the way I find it quite useful to frame this point without resorting to conservative cliches is, let's imagine that a Christian and an atheist want to have a debate.

Well, first of all, that's already a big thing. They want to have a debate about the existence of God. existence of God. And let's say that the Christian says to the atheist, well, it's absolutely fundamental to me as a person that you understand that I consider myself to be made in the image and likeness of God. And the atheist says, okay, I understand that. That's fine. He said, okay, but you have to like treat me the way I understand myself. So that means you have to refer to me as a child of God and you have to, and you have to refrain from anything that means you have to refer to me as a child of god and you have to and you have to refrain from anything that i could consider to be blasphemy so you're not allowed to suggest for for a second that god doesn't exist because otherwise that's like very offensive and i

couldn't possibly you know i think you would quickly find that that debate would not be a debate in fact it would be impossible to actually have any sort of meaningful disagreement, any sort of exchange of views. And that's how I feel the transgender thing has turned out. It's a very strongly held philosophical view about one's personal identity. There are many of those out there. Many of them are very interesting and worthy to discuss but it's not allowed to be challenged because in this scenario to just borrow from the analogy i just set up you know if you use the wrong pronouns you have challenged my existence if

you suggest that i might not really be truly um sex I identify with, you have challenged my existence. And therefore, we're not going to debate about it. You're just going to F off and get out of my life. And that's actually what's driving it. I would say that the transgender philosophy is fundamentally religious. That's the irony of it. No, I would agree with that. I mean, I often talk about, so I was raised in, I would say, strong fundamentalist Christian environments growing up. And now I would consider myself much more moderate of a Christian and a centrist, I would even say politically, religiously, and in so many ways. But what I've seen is the farther you go across the spectrum from

religious fundamentalism to, you know, hyper radical progressivism, the posture is almost the same. It's just the, the assumptions are different, but the tone, the, the, the rhetoric, The assumptions are different, but the tone, the rhetoric, the way you can't get along with anybody that doesn't accept your whole ideological package, it's almost exactly identical. You know, and as a centrist, I'll get attacks from both the far right and far left. And sometimes I want to, you know, post the tweets next to each other because they're almost identical in the tone. You should. That would be a useful exercise. It's fascinating. Yeah. So when you said it's in an ironic way, a very, let's just say, non-religious ideology or non-religious community is fundamentally religious in the way it forms and maintains its ideology. I would very much, very much agree with that. Are you familiar with the work of Jonathan Haidt? Yeah, you know, he was my, he was my academic supervisor. What? No way! I'm so jealous. Oh, my God. Well, so him and, I mean, in his, in The Righteous Mind,

and also his recent book with George Lukianoff, you know, they talk about, especially the last book, the coddling of the American mind. Have you read it? Are you familiar with it? Yes. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I am. Yeah. So in my final year at NYU, I did an independent study under him while he was like trying to finish that.

Oh, my gosh. Okay. I read it before anybody did. Oh, my word. I did an independent study under him while he was like trying to finish that. Oh my gosh. Okay. So I read it before anybody did. Oh my word, I'm so jealous. That book, I think it was the most significant book I read in 2018. And I read a lot of books, but I mean that, I think that what they're saying in that book is very intertwined with this whole conversation, primarily that there has been a massive rise in this culture of safetyism, as they call it, that people are no longer just offended at like genuine hate speech or bullying, you know, but actually just an idea that they disagree with is now seen as offensive and possibly suicidal. And like you're saying, if you mispronounce somebody, that that person is now going to

claim you're increasing my suicide rate and everything. And can you maybe, since you're so familiar with Hyatt and his whole work, I mean, can you expand on that? Because I think that that is a significant piece to this. Would you agree with that? Oh, sure. I mean, so I'll actually start with an example. So when we were, when I was being trained as a teacher, so as I was saying to you, I briefly trained as a teacher before coming to the States, which I did in 2016 to NYU. coming out to the states which I did in 2016 to NYU I we had we had training on how to teach transgenderism to children so this was children as young as five although I was working with high schoolers and we had and I remember flicking through the guidebook and in the guidebook there was a list of things that could potentially be transphobic bullying. So it's not just bullying, because

in my book, bullying is bullying. It doesn't really matter why. Transphobic bullying. And under the list were things such as gestures, looks, nonverbal communication. And it just went on and on and on. And I just thought to myself, is terrible because we are going in and we are saying to people here's a group of people who are really different and really oppressed and everybody's out to get them and they're all miserable and they're all thinking of killing themselves and don't do any one of these things otherwise Otherwise, like you're going to be contributing to that. And I was thinking like, like it's, it's as if like people are being taught. Well, they are being taught.

And this is how it's point to kind of think pathologically and expect offense at every turn. And then, and then it becomes obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you live like that, you will be miserable. Yeah. Because life is full of slights and rejections and disappointments and people also saying mean and annoying things and you know the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy which yeah and and we kind of lay out in their book is to teaching people to overcome anxiety and depression by thinking

through and past that stuff so by thinking actually do you know what like nobody else has the power over how i think and therefore nobody else has the power over how i feel right and that is very empowering and leads to a well-rounded resilient human being adult but if you teach to to kids that to kids the opposite uh you end up with with essentially just prolonged adolescence yeah where universities become these dangerously insular places where where people just don't grow up and are completely unprepared for the real world yeah and i think the difference is because i want to acknowledge that there are people that for whatever reason biological maybe it's um maybe it's something in their past maybe they've been through so many past traumatic experiences that, you know, certain statements or words could genuinely, and I'm going to use the phrase, you know, trigger a past experience.

And that could be really significant. a unhealthy place to move from now, ever since 2014, 15 is Luke Yonoff and height recognize that now we're like encouraging it and almost validating it and, and, and pushing people rather than recognizing that if a slightest little comment triggers something dramatic from your past that, I mean,

any psychologist worth his or her salt would say, okay, that's an unhealthy place. We need to move you to a more healthy place where you can hear a comment and be able to recognize that this person is not out to kill me, whatever, they're not, they didn't mean it or whatever. Now, instead of recognizing that that's an unhealthy place to move from, now we're trying to keep people there. Right. I think that's the biggest difference. And I think the other phrase he uses in the book a lot is concept creep. Right. So we used to, for example, like trauma, the word trauma.

Right. So we used to reserve post-traumatic stress disorder for just the absolute worst things. for just the absolute worst things that i think the way it was defined in medical literature was as something that is so rare and has such a profound effect on like negative effect on that any person who experienced this would be traumatized right we'd have this this reaction and so the examples historically were things like war or rape or you know um these types of things whereas now it can be like you know people claiming they have ptsd because I don't know like on social media somebody said something you know it's just this kind of stuff and um and it does become like this this feedback loop right where you you're telling yourself like these things and then it does become true you know it becomes true because um people around you do start treating you differently because the thing is we do treat each other largely on on the basis of how we act right so if somebody's very reserved and quiet

and like not really like being themselves because they told themselves all this negative stuff that person is going to find it more difficult to make friends and socialize and it becomes this like feedback loop so i think when you combine that with the philosophical extreme extremism i was outlining before that's a pretty toxic mix yeah yeah yeah well madeline where do you see i've got so many questions um i want before i'm gonna throw this out and i want to come back to it because I have another question I want to ask. But I do want to talk about the suicide, the role that suicidality plays in this whole conversation, the 41% that we hear. It seems that in the last couple years, you know, I don't know, five years, that, how do I say it? A particular ideology has outpaced even like scientific research and has become dogma in a lot of people, a growing number of people like John Haidt and others questioning the wisdom behind that or Steven Pinker and other like really, again, not conservative thinkers, but just highly respected intellectuals that are saying, I think we need to put the brakes on some of this stuff. And shutting down free speech in this really important new conversation is not healthy.

Do you see this ideology, okay, that would feed into some, maybe let's just say trans activism and so on, lessening or becoming more influential? I'm sorry, I'm not communicating this very clearly. No, no, no, I understand. Where are we going to be in five to 10 years in this? Sure. So it's a great question. In fact, the question, isn't it?

And I have two minds about it because I think on one level, I'm actually pretty hopeful that this is going to run its course and it's probably going to run its course quite soon. And the reason for that is twofold. The first is that it affects too many other things. So I've spoken earlier in this podcast about the effect it has on gay people and especially gay

young people. Also, you know, if you want to go even further into the gay community, I hate saying community because I think it's so patronising, but you know what I mean. Like if you speak to lesbians, as I have done, you find that a lot of them are very upset because heterosexual men who become transgender, who haven't had any physical changes, so they still have all their male equipment, they then identify as lesbians and expect lesbians to be their dating partners and lesbians are not attracted to males by definition so it causes lesbians i've told you i've said it's introduced a kind of rape culture into into their communities um so there's like the touches on on gay politics it touches on

uh feminism you know i mean women's sports is just a joke. Like it's a really bad joke. We all know it. It's just so obvious. It's right in front of our eyes. Um, but more seriously, you know, women's prisons and that sort of thing. Um, it touches on, uh, parental rights. It touches on, uh, the right to conscientious objection in the medical profession um i mean the the list goes on you know teachers like whatever but the but the but the other thing that it does and this is why i'm sort of hopeful is that it is affecting children in a way that is so profound and life-altering that if in five to ten years or however long it takes somebody comes forward with a lawsuit and says this was done to me when I was young and I was obviously unable to give informed consent to this and I'm obviously not transgender because I've now

realized that like this was the wrong thing and so that means I'm not transgender so there was a mistake made I think that could really shut down the medical side of this you could really shut it down because I mean that's that's happened basically every medical scandal that's always how it ends up right it's not an issue that's resolved in the culture it's an issue that's resolved in the courts now having said all that so there's reason for hope and this political issue this philosophical issue is not going away this is only going to get more and more aggressive and it's only going to get more and more um inventive as we have advancements in technology and you know trans humanism and all that stuff with philosophy like that it is going to just keep going and so and so the question is where next where do we go next so i will share with you something somebody said to me

which i don't i don't know exactly why i make this but i thought it was so interesting um that i'm going to share it with you and that is that somebody said to me if a child can consent to sex change why not sex i don't really have an answer to that and I think one of the things that really does worry me and this is a concern I share with a lot of people on the left is the sexualization of children using gender as a as a mask right? So the whole drag kid thing, I don't know if you're familiar with Desmond is Amazing and that kind of stuff, right? Now, is that where the caravan is headed?

I don't know. Some people think it is. I hope not. But it's definitely something to watch out for and to be very clear that predators will always use anything they can to get access to children. And that's not to say that trans people are paedophiles. Not at all. That's not what i'm saying i'm saying that when you create a

a community or a place that's focused on the body that's focused on genitals and all the rest of it and you through through political force you cut out all of your normal safeguarding procedures and nobody's allowed to question it because if you do, then how dare you, you have just, you know, homophobia, transphobia or whatever, then you are, you're really, really asking for trouble. Right. Right. And I think that's, that's, that's something a lot, a lot of people are very concerned about, but scared to talk about.

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's good's good i appreciate that and it is hard to predict you know which way it will go you know i the one thing that's kind of confusing again is here you have or even you have like um you know some a lot of feminists speaking out again you have you have liberal feminine feminists speaking out against liberal, say, trans activists, whatever. And it's, there's few other conversations that I've seen where you see people within this similar kind of moral camp, generally speaking, political camp, generally speaking, who would both be, you know, profusiously anti-Trump and maybe even anti-religion, and yet having two fundamentally different kind of

worldviews or ideologies in this conversation, I'm kind of shocked. Well, I have been, I have to admit, I mean, again, as an evangelical Christian, in listening to a lot of radical feminists, or I'll just call them feminists. I don't think they're all that radical. They're just consistent feminists. Some of their concerns on not all trans people, but a particular trans ideology, it's pretty, to me, it just, it does make a lot of sense. And I'm wondering, kind of, I just haven't seen a really good response to some of their concerns.

So probably just to sum it up that it up, that gender, masculinity, and femininity have been used by male patriarchy for how many hundreds of years to oppress women. And yet some versions of a trans ideology, again, not every single trans person or people with gender dysphoria, but a particular ideology are basically resurrecting these same stereotypes. And the entire ideology rests upon a very distinct thing called masculinity and femininity. And if you're a female bodied person who is more masculine, then you're actually a boy ontologically. But all you're doing there is relying upon these old yeah no exactly so if you if you play with trucks you're a boy and if you play with dolls you're a girl yeah and i mean you also see this with the male to female i have feminists who are very very offended but male to female transgender people or transsexual people who basically like go around looking like porn stars right right right

right yeah you know like massive breasts blonde wigs and like you know in fact um douglas murray the the british writer made this point once where he said that there was there was a a panel some some like i think it was bb BBC or something that might not have been but some British TV panel of people there's a transgender woman on and as she's talking she gets out her knitting and she starts knitting and you know like did we really like campaign for the vote and like you know equal rights and equal pay and all that stuff so that um a male can identify as a female with his knitting on tv yes resurrecting the 1920s image of what a female should be it's just it's it's actually like some of it is i mean it's not funny because people's lives are at stake and a lot of these people have had very difficult lives.

But there is, if you just purely look at it in terms of the ideas and the performance of it, there is something very, very comical about the whole thing. This is where I, it seems, I'm going to assume, I'm trying to be, I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to assume that I must be missing something because to me it seems so blatantly obvious that, again, certain forms of an ideology is resurrecting and depending upon old 20th century stereotypes. And so I understand why feminists

are so up in arms over this. I just don't, maybe I'm missing something because it seems so blatant to me and I haven't seen a really good counter response. No, I don't think you are missing anything because the response is, shut up, you bigot. Yeah. I mean, I think that really just tells you everything you need to know.

Like there isn't actually a good response to any of this stuff. So you either get shut down or you get baffled by just sheer outlandishness yeah yeah slurs and everything so okay so the argument is what you know shut up you bigot and then the next phrase would be you're you're increasing the suicide rate by just opening your mouth you know can you do you have any thoughts on the suicide rate and let me just i guess this. I have several friends who do experience intense gender dysphoria, who on a day-to-day battle, or day-to-day basis, battle intense dysphoria, and they would struggle with suicide ideation. I mean, this is no joke. Now, the friends that I'm thinking of, most of them at least would still identify by their biological sex, but they would turn right around

and say, for whatever reason, this is a minute by minute, hour by hour battle to accept that. But they are, so they're not embracing the ideology. They are experiencing the profound discomfort that some people, for whatever reason, experience. So I don't, I just want to acknowledge, empathize with, and do whatever I can to help somebody in that situation. Sure. I mean, there's, yeah. Well, I guess leading up to my question is, I does feel in some cases that suicidality can become, not always, but can become weaponized to promote an ideology where I'm not allowed to raise any sort of ontological,

philosophical, anthropological, scientific questions because whatever you say, you're going to increase suicidality. I'm like, well, suicidality is way more complex than that, first of all. And if I just simply raise questions about a particular ideology and if that increases suicide then there's other things going on that shouldn't increase suicidality so anyway

i'll have to say your thoughts or research what you found in the suicide rate sure so yeah the first thing to say is that there are lots and lots of mental health conditions which increase your likelihood for suicidality. So many. And there isn't actually, to my knowledge, and to the knowledge of Kenneth Zucker, who told me this, there's not really any evidence to suggest that it's any higher than necessarily among people with gender dysphoria than say people with depression or people with eating disorders or whatever i mean it would really

depend on the study and the sample size and so many other things but there isn't anything by definition that makes this vulnerable population any more vulnerable than any other vulnerable population if that makes sense so that's the first thing to say interesting having said that having said that uh suicidality is uh is a is a problem within the within the within people groups of people who have uh gender dysphoria and as is always the case with suicide you have to be very very careful about how you address that because as we know if you talk about suicide in a certain way in the media if you advertise it in a certain way then then you actually increase the likelihood that other people are going to commit suicide.

So I think, first of all, that there is a very dangerous thing going on right now, which is, as you alluded to, the politicization of suicide, which may actually be counterproductive and giving more people the idea of killing themselves as a solution to this particular distress by the way we talk about it and the way we obsess about it. But the second thing I would say is that somebody feeling suicidal is actually a separate problem from the mental health problem that they have so it's it's not

you you don't like if I had an eating disorder and I and I wanted to um I was refusing food and I was suicidal and I said you know like I'm going to kill myself like you don't then say well we're going to just let her continue to refuse food because otherwise she'll kill herself like it's it's understood that first of all i need i need help for this physical thing and then i need help for this psychological thing and the two are interrelated but it but we don't conflate the two and we don't use my psychological state as a reason to intervene or not intervene right and so i think again that would suggest very strongly to me that the the

suicide thing is politicized in order to achieve a certain outcome which if it weren't for suicide there is absolutely no evidence and no rationale that would justify that intervention right so if if you're saying that like we need to remove this 13 year old healthy breasts and i say no we don't and you say well she's going to kill herself right right let's let's imagine that that that I managed to make the counter argument and persuade that person that that's not a justification for this intervention. And in fact, that's not even true. What were the other reasons for her having her breasts removed?

You know, like what is the other rationale? So I think what the suicide thing does is it clouds the emptiness of the argument and the emptiness of so much of this research. Well, it takes the place of maybe a scientific or even ethical argument for, you know, sex reassignment surgery or transitioning or even social transitioning. you know, sex reassignment surgery or transitioning or, or even social transitioning. And it kind of prevents, and again, I'm not saying, I'll say this one more time and I'll stop, you know, repeating myself, but I'm not saying to every person who is either suicidal or concerned about suicide in the trans community is, is doing this. Okay.

But it does seem, at least in some cases, it is being weaponized out of a motivation to embrace and project an ideology. It's a motivation for a certain treatment. But the other thing to add, of course, is that there's a very serious conversation to be had, and it's not one I necessarily want to have because I'm very conflicted about it and I feel like I haven't read enough about it, but there's a very serious conversation to be had about

whether this treatment that they're suggesting increases or decreases the likelihood of suicide that's the other big thing so Dr Paul McHugh who I know is a notorious figure in certain circles, although I don't really understand why I had lunch with him a couple of months ago and I just thought he was the sweetest person I'd ever met. But anyway, he shut down the sex change surgeries at Johns Hopkins

in the late 1970s because of this very reason. He said, no, we just don't have the evidence to suggest this is helping. Now, I've met trans people who say it was life-saving and it did help them, and I have no reason to not believe them. But it's not to say that that's going to work for everybody. So not only is a suicide argument a kind of political tool, it also logically doesn't necessarily follow. And so there's, you you know it's one of

those things though that when you have this um big emotional issue that you can just throw out there and then uh when somebody wants to respond as I want to respond you know it's actually um I agree it's an emotional issue but it's actually like much much more complicated than that right sometimes there's just like for whatever reason there's just less of um there's just less of a response to to that right then than the first one and also i mean according to suicide.org i think that's fairly authoritative i think maybe i think 90 of suicides are result of an undiagnosed mental health condition. Right. And a high percentage, I don't know the exact percentage, but a high percentage of people who do have gender dysphoria or identify as trans have a co-occurring mental health condition.

You mentioned, I mean, autism. That's the other thing, yeah. The autism rate is anywhere from 50% to, I just heard Susan Bradley, who's the world renowned expert on gender dysphoria in children, been doing research for 40, 50 years. She said in a podcast, she said, I'm almost convinced that close to, I think she even said 100% of people with gender dysphoria would also be on the autism spectrum. And then there's many other things going on, or even this, this is what was so troubling with the Lisa Lippman study, not with her study,

but with some of the quotes in that study of parents taking their child who came out as trans as a teenager and going to a, you know, a counselor, gender clinic. And within 30 minutes, they're being kind of prescribed hormones or whatever cross hormone therapy but then the parents like wait a minute this person has been my child has also been sexually abused they have had eating disorders they've had depression and the counselor is like i don't need to hear any of that like they almost don't want to hear all of these other traumatic things that probably have to are i'm just going to say i mean this is you know probably mike also contribute to the suicidality in your child.

Oh, of course they do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, so I, again, this is where, not in every case, but in some cases when I hear people seemingly weaponize the suicidality, it almost, I almost wonder if they actually care about the suicidality of the person. If they are going to plug their ears ears they don't want to listen to any sort of other thing going on that might also be contributing to that which yeah i would yeah just to summarize i would just say that the suicidality thing is is uh the way the activists talk about it is a a gross oversimplification of an incredibly complicated issue which is related to as you point out many many other issues and it is be a political tool yeah um which is counterproductive right because in trying to help you know let's just assume that they have the best motives in the world like in trying to use this as a political

tool to help trans people you could actually end up having the opposite effect and, and making people think that the world's out to get them. And if people don't accept their gender identity that, you know, they are likely to kill themselves and gosh, why don't I just kill myself? And so, yeah. So I would just, I would just say like, it's, it's very unfortunate. I think the way we talk about suicide. Have you, have you received, I mean, I'm going to say death threats or backlash. I mean, you have to have received a lot of hate mail. Yes. I mean, death threats, I've only had one, which I have to say, these could be famous last words.

I hope not. It was quite thrilling, actually, because I felt like gosh I'm I'm important enough to get a chance when does that ever happen anyway I felt like I'd made it you're an optimist aren't you these are these are words I I would really regret if I was ever faced with this situation sorry I don't mean to trivialize it um uh but I have also you know I get a lot of like emails and and uh you're a horrible person you're this you're that um um one person actually this this this was quite clever I'd written me a long email and and the first 20 words were like very flattering and then and then they wrote and that was enough to get you to read. And I thought, that's very clever. That's very clever. Well done. Appealing to my vanity in this way.

But, yeah, no, I mean, I do get backlash. But, you know, I mean, ultimately, if you can't stand the heat, get out the kitchen. So whatever. You know what you're getting into and you know that you're poking the bear. You know, it's kind of water off a duck's back at this point because for every message like that I get, I also get a lot of really very encouraging and rewarding messages from all sorts of people. And also, sometimes I get messages from people who I don't necessarily agree with, but we have a very interesting exchange so trans women uh recently emailed me saying you know sometimes

i like your pieces and sometimes i think you um you know there's an invective in in your prose and that sort of thing and anyway it was it was a very constructive back and forth and very cordial and uh worthwhile so um so yeah but it's fine it's fine have you gotten positive responses from trans people yeah but they tend to be the kind of old school transsexuals um so people who you know have been transitioned for a long time and are equally concerned about the kids that i mean my main issues really are as i say like um with the children and also I do write about how it affects women um okay uh and so so yeah I've had um in contact with quite a few actually they're very helpful to run things by because like obviously I don't um I don't want I don't want to sort of make enemies

and make people feel uncomfortable I mean sometimes it's expressing things um fact things factually and truthfully does make people uncomfortable. So I'm not going to let that stop me, but it certainly isn't my intention to do that. And if I can reach as broad a church as possible, and if I can speak in the voice that reaches the furthest, I would like to do that. So that's what I try to do. Madeline, thanks so much for being on the show. We're coming up on an hour here, and I've taken so much of your time. So thanks so much for being on the show. We're coming up on an hour here and I've taken so much of your time. So thanks so much for being on Theology Never All. Where can people get ahold of you? You've got a website, right?

Sure. I have a website, madelinecairns.com. And then on Twitter, I'm just Madeline Cairns. And it's Madeline with three E's. So that's M-A-D-E-L-E-I-N-E. And Cairns is K-E-A-R-N-S. I always do that because like at Starbucks, you know, they're like, I'm meaty, matty, muddy. Okay. Just give me the cup.

I'll write it myself. And you, how often do you write? I mean, I write articles is like once a month, several times a month or. Well, no, I'm. This is a really good question. So I try and write. Two articles a week for online.

But the big, so the one you had in your hand is a sort of longer term project. So that's like a big reported piece. And I would probably do them once every six weeks or something, you know, something really very, very thorough and on the ground. So yes, but really I should be i should be writing constantly it's um you know it's a tough job and do you do you speak as well or i'm sure i know you've been

on uh on t been interviewed before on tv and stuff or yeah i mean i i'll probably end up doing more of that i'm just i mean i've only actually had this job for just over a year. Okay. So I'm relatively, relatively new to the game. So, but yeah, I've done like a couple of panels and, you know, like radio and that kind of thing. So yeah, probably I'll go down that route eventually. I just, you know, waiting to be asked. Well, thanks so much for your work. Again, I just I so appreciate just your your courage, your honesty, your even even here just talking to you, you know, your, your genuine love for people and your humility. And even though you're dealing with

topics that can drive some people really mad and give the impression that you're some feisty person that's just out to, you know, get people, it's not your intention at all no so i really appreciate that and and your thoroughness and again the the article that i would highly recommend it's called the trans child as experimental guinea pig i mean it's filled with a ton of research i don't know this must have taken you a long time to it really really did so thank you for noticing that it's got a lot of research because it really was a painful process that one because I I didn't want to leave any any stone unturned you know I wanted to to write something that that somebody could um uh somebody could pick up and yeah and immediately you know just get a sense of what this was all about yeah well I mean this is the this is the world I've been in for the last

several years so all this stuff is all the same stuff I'm reading and people I'm talking to and stuff so it's really exciting to see somebody in the same world so yeah great well it's a pleasure talking with you thanks so much yeah all right take care thanks so much bye Thank you.