Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1086: A Raw Conversation with My New Transgender Friend: Julia Malott

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Julia is a transgender woman from Toronto, Ontario, who's determined to bridge the divide that’s forming on transgender matters. In this conversation, we discuss many things related to the transgender conversation including gender dysphoria, transitioning, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria among teens, navigating the pronoun debate, dead naming, biological sex and gender identity/expression, autogynephilia, biological males in female sports, and other related topics. You can follow Julia on Twitter (@AlottaMalotta) and through her website: https://alottamalotta.com Support Theology in the Raw through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theologyintheraw

All right, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Rob. My guest today is Julia Malat. Julia is a transgender woman from Toronto, Ontario, who's determined to bridge the divide that's forming on transgender matters. I came across Julia on Twitter, where I watched a few videos that she made, one in particular regarding the whole pronoun debate, and I thought her perspective was extremely reasonable and thoughtful and nuanced. And then I watched another video and another and another. I'm like, man, Julia seems pretty awesome. And I want to get to know her. So that's what this podcast is all about. I know hardly anything about Julia before inviting her on the podcast. And so you're going to listen in on our conversation where we get to know each other.

podcast. And so you're going to listen in on our conversation where we get to know each other. And I just had a wonderful, wonderful time talking with Julia about all kinds of stuff related to the very volatile and highly debated transgender conversation. So please welcome to Theology Narada for the first time, the one and only Julia Malat. Julia, welcome to Theology in the Raw. Yeah, thanks for having me. Okay, here's a quick backstory for people that don't know. I was on Twitter, which is odd because I'm on Twitter a lot these days. I kind of tweet and run, like I'll tweet something and then get out of there. But for some reason, one of your videos popped up in my feed and I clicked on it or maybe did somebody send it to me? Somebody might've sent it to me or tagged me in it.

No, I think you might've tagged me in it. I don't know. Either way. I think I did. I don't remember. I remember watching and I forget which one it was. I ended up watching several since then but I was just so blown away at you a trans woman talking about a really contentious topic but in a way that was extremely for lack of a better term just very reasonable and thoughtful and gracious and I'm like oh man here's a person that is wanting to engage people who might disagree and have a good faith dialogue and even the one on pronouns was, it was so good. It was one of the best five minute overviews of the pronoun conversation, because you're like, obviously I'm trans, I have my pronouns or whatever. But then the majority of it was

trying to like, maybe help other trans people not get so uptight when people maybe for whatever reason, don't want to use your pronouns and they might mess up and like, don't put too much faith and stock in your prone. Like, I was like, wow, this is really fascinating to hear a trans person talk like this. Like, so anyway, all that to say, I was like, I got to have you on the podcast and just get to know you. So that's what we're doing here. We have no, no agenda, no agenda here just to have a conversation. So thank you for coming on the show. Oh, absolutely. I so appreciate that. And it's weird to hear you talk about me and my videos that way, because I've been talking about you and your books that way for the past year. And I think

what you've put together is fantastic. And the way that you frame this conversation is so important and so rare. And so I have your book and I'm handing it out to people all over the place. And to hear you appreciate my work, I don't know. It's just an honor, to be quite honest. Well, yeah. Well, the honor is very, very mutual. And this is really cool because I'm going to get to know you live and everybody else is going to get to know you, the people that don't already know you. So tell us your story. Where'd you grow up? Did you grow up in a Christian home? Would love to hear you talk about your experience with gender dysphoria and how you navigated what I'm sure is a really difficult and challenging

journey. Absolutely. So I grew up in a small farming town in Ontario, in Canada. It's called Hanover and it has 7,000 people. I think it has 7,500 people now. So that's how fast farming towns in Ontario grow over a 35-year period. And I grew up in a Christian household. So we actually started at a United Church of Canada. And when I was, I think, seven years old, we went to the evangelical church in our town. And that was the Evangelical Missionary Church. So that was my upbringing. And I loved it. That was how I learned what community was. That was how I learned what faith was. And I found it immensely valuable in my life. And I was gender dysphoric. And that's something that I have always felt. But I don't like the way that lots of trans people sometimes

characterize it. I think it's easy to almost over exaggerate sometimes the really young ages. Maybe that's just my own impression. But for me, I felt it when I was young, but I didn't know what it was because I knew that I was a boy. I knew that I had a penis. These things were very obvious. And I was a science-y kid. So I knew that that made me a boy and it just wasn't what it was. But I also knew that it didn't work. I didn't know how to socialize. I didn't know how to connect. It didn't feel right. And as I got older, that became stronger and stronger. And so when I was 12 or 13, I think 12 years old, would have been when I discovered online what it meant to be transgender. Of course, back then, this was the early 2000s. So this wasn't something that was available in schools. This wasn't something that was available

on the health system. I had seen, I think, four counselors before grade seven to try to figure out why can't Jason have friends? Why doesn't Jason connect with people? What's going on? Why does Jason have so much anxiety? But we never went, we didn't even go in the maybe Jason's gay direction, let alone the maybe Jason's trans direction. So by grade seven, I was becoming depressed enough and struggling enough that I kind of was able to zero in what I was feeling. And this was through a conversation at school. There was a kid who I was friends with named Jordan, and we were chatting in the playground once. And then the conversation went towards talking about grass being greener on the other side and gender. And I kind of said, like, I think everyone feels that way though, right? Like, I feel like girls have it better

and girls feel like boys have it better. And we all just kind of wish that we could experience the other side because it would make more sense, right? And he kind of looked at me and was like, no, I don't think most people feel that way. And that was when it clicked of like, maybe this is a me thing. Maybe there's something going on and this isn't just everybody's experience. And so I was a Googler back when I was 12 and I went online and the resources were not good. These were blogs by individuals that when they set up some stuff, but I'd read the descriptions and I thought like, that is, that is me that describes everything I'm feeling. And so that was both a blessing and a curse in a sense. It was a blessing because I thought, oh, now I can have a framework to understand what I'm thinking and what I'm feeling.

And there are other people who feel that way. But it was also a bit isolating because I was far too ashamed to share it with anybody. This was right around the time that gay marriage was becoming a very controversial issue in Canada. It wasn't yet legalized. That would happen in 2005. So a few years later at my church, that's a big, that's a big issue. And we have speakers coming in talking about the problem of gay marriage and what this was going to mean. And I was sitting there thinking, well, if it's soized it and thought, you know, I can't tell anybody this. I can't do anything about this. And these were real decisions I was making. When I was 14, I was kind of, I was a mathy kid. So I did the math of like, I could run away from home

and I could transition and all these things, but I'd lose my parents and surgeries are very expensive. And I had like $300 in my bank account. And I thought I can't do this or I could ignore it. I could ignore it. And so that was what I did. And this is also when I got deeper in my faith, to be quite frank, because I thought I'm going to find solutions in religion. I was living a bit of a double life. My parents knew about none of this, but actually a quick funny story. So I had a computer in my bedroom and my mom was very worried about me having a computer in my bedroom because church had taught that your teenage boy will just be looking at porn. That's what they're going to do if it's in your bedroom. But I had one. And for me, there was no porn. I had never

once tried that. But what I was doing was reading journal articles all about transgender matters. And I was following, you know, Ray Blanchard and Anne Lawrence and Michael Bailey and all of these individuals as they were coming up. I'm like reading their papers. I'm also diving in on the, on the religious side. So if your book had existed, the people to be loved book back then, that's what I needed, but it wasn't, it didn't exist. So I was, I bought a Greek Bible. I bought a lexicon and a concordance and I was going through it thinking in my 14 year old, you know, full of myself brain, like clearly nobody's asked this question before. I bet I can find the answer. I just have to look up these Greek words and it's all going to be clear that, that God does, you know, does enable me to be trans or that I'm not, or what's going on. And I was also

preoccupied with the science because I thought that the trans narrative that often comes out is, well, trans people, that you're a woman in a man's body. And I thought, well, if that's true, then I should transition. But if that's not true, then I shouldn't. So I wanted to answer these questions. So I went through this period of getting no answers, but learning a lot of science and theology and also building up a ton of shame because I was telling nobody I was not dealing with any of it. And I carried that really till I was 28 years old. I met my wife-to-be when we were 16. She moved to my little town and we started dating a year later when we were 17. When we were 18, I told her how I felt about my gender. She was the first and only

person I told for many years, but I didn't do anything about it. And I kind of told her I wasn't going to do anything about it. I just internalized it and said, no, but I'm going to be a man. I'm going to live this way. And I don't have a lot of regrets in life, but for me, that's one of them because I was a really horrible husband to her because I had actively chosen to not even deal with my own mental health issues and to deal with my own decision not to have happiness here. I kind of was staring happiness in the face and saying, rather than face this, I'm going to allow this shame bubble to build. And of course, shame can lead to narcissism, which I absolutely exhibited in my relationship. That was the path that my life ended up heading. When I was 28 years old, then everything kind of came to a fruition. I had an earlier midlife

crisis than many people have, but I didn't know how to cope with it anymore. And that was brought on by a lot of things. One of which was actually that I was feeling increasingly isolated in my friendships because when I was younger, when I'm in university, cross-sex friendships are still pretty normal, but by the time you're 28, people are getting married. And so a lot of those, those women who I had been friends with, they now had husbands and it wasn't so appropriate for me to be connecting with them in the same way that I had before. And I had relational strains forming in my marriage, which were also being made worse by me ignoring everything and pulling away from that relationship. And it ultimately led to a suicide attempt, which led me to spend time in the psychiatric ward, which led to me actually

talking about this with a psychiatrist and started me down the whole path of transitioning. I'm just writing down questions as you go. And we can circle back to probably several things here, but on a scale of like one to 10, your gender dysphoria, was it like an eight, nine, 10? Did it kind of fluctuate? Did it get stronger as you got older? So I know it's kind of different for everybody, right? Yeah, for me, it was always present. I wouldn't say stronger or weaker, but I would say that it was the most important thing in my life. It preoccupied me.

And looking back now, I do wonder to the extent to which that was dysphoria and the extent to which that was my own obsession with my dysphoria, as I wasn't dealing with it, how much I made it more, because now I don't think about this that much. But back then I thought about it all the time. I lived my life walking through this world, looking at everyone else thinking,

you don't know my pain. You don't know my struggle. You don't know what I'm feeling. And that was not healthy. I don't think. Does it create kind of like a looping effect in a sense? Like the dysphoria spikes these kind of social anxiety for like better terms, you know, you're walking around a very gendered world and then that causes you to think about your dysphoria and then that exacerbates your dysphoria. Is that an accurate way of kind of? I think it, I think it is. Yeah. And that's something that will come a bit later in my story, but I realized that I had more than one thing going on. Sure. I had gender dysphoria. I also had this shame bubble that I wasn't dealing with. And I also had a problem with

authenticity because I was hiding everything that I was feeling and experiencing. And I'm still trying to separate those and say, how much was what? Because all of those, I think, led to a very unhealthy mental state. And while the dysphoria existed and still can be present, I actually don't, I'm not convinced that was the biggest problem that I had. I think the bigger problem was we live in a very gendered world and I wasn't able to even have those conversations when I was shoehorned into, you have to do this because you're a man and this is what a Christian man does. I couldn't really even have that conversation because I wasn't telling people how I felt. So I don't have that answer. It's not knowing how it could have been different, but I certainly wonder for myself

how much of it was the dysphoria versus everything else. That's interesting. I have other things I want to come back to, but yeah, go ahead and continue your story. You're 28 years old and yeah, pick it up there again. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm 28 years old. I reached a point where I ultimately decided to attempt to transition. And this was over about an eight month period where the world just felt dim is the best way I can describe it. I, I was suicidal the entire time, but not that manic suicide as though like I need to stop from jumping off a cliff more like I just looked at the world and said, but there's nothing here for me anymore. I've done it all. This isn't a place that I want to be. That brought me to a place of saying, why don't I try transition?

Because maybe that will help you. Maybe that will solve these things. And if it doesn't, then at least you'll know. And you can still quite honestly kill yourself as I wanted to do. And so I started to go down that path and I started to explore and the spoiler alert, my life completely turned around and I'm much happier now. and the spoiler alert, my life completely turned around and I'm much happier now. But what I, what I do question too, is how much of it was the transition and how much of it was the dealing with the authenticity and the shame, because I do think that those were huge, huge

parts of it. And by choosing to transition, I dealt with those. Maybe I didn't, maybe there's a path where I didn't need to transition and I could have just dealt with those. I didn't find that, but I certainly wouldn't want to suggest that it couldn't have gone that way. As things did go for me, though, so I started to transition. My wife and I did separate, which was more a result of my behavior in our relationship before and leading up to that point in my life. I was not a good husband.

I was not treating her well. I didn't even know it at the time. But looking back, that was a bigger part of it than my transition itself. And I ended up in, I think, the mental space that a lot of trans people, and especially trans women, end up, where this transition is affirming. You're finding some relationships that are helping you to deal with what you've been experiencing, but you're still living in a very victimized place where I can blame the world for not accepting me, for not seeing me as I want to be seen or for not structuring itself in such a way that I can do and be, you know, how I am maybe seeing myself. And I was in

that space for a while. And then I was so fortunate because just at the beginning of COVID, my work, I work in software and I was given access to a very high profile career and life coach. So for a year I had access to this individual and I could meet with him as much as I wanted to. So we'd have these one-on-one calls and he made it clear from the beginning that this was kind of work career coaching. He's like, but work life, it's all overlapping. So like, we're going to talk about your marriage. We're going to talk about anything you want to talk about because you're one person and they all, they all play into it. He really drove into me the ideas of integrity and authenticity.

And I read probably 60 books that year with him. I read Alan Watts. I read Dale Carnegie. I read all kinds of stuff. And I realized through that, that I had an authenticity problem with others. And I knew about that. And I thought transition is great. And I'm feeling better because now when I walk into a room, people know this thing about

me. They know how I'm feeling. And that was good. But I also realized that in the process of transitioning, I had developed an authenticity problem with myself because I was now also living not reality. When you transition, at least for me, what made me feel better was saying, I'm a woman. I'm female. I'm just like everybody else who's born female.

And that's not true. But I would tell myself that because it felt good. And what kind of clicked this for me was the pronoun piece that I know you touched on earlier here that I have so many loving and lovely people in my life and these people want to affirm me and they want to make me feel good. So when I told them that I was transitioning, they call me she, her, because they know that's what I'm looking for. And then they make a mistake because my voice is low or because I'm pretty tall or because I have masculine facial features or because they knew me as Jason for 30 years.

And when they would do that, when someone who loves me and cares for me is out and says he, instead of she, it would rip me apart and it would put me in this spot where for days I'd be thinking about it and focused on it. And as I worked through this with my, with my life coach, I realized that's because I'm not living in reality because I'm pretending that I am biologically female and I'm pretending that everyone sees me that way. And when they say that, they've accidentally broken that bubble for me and shown me that even though they love me,

even though they want me in their circles, they do see that I'm biologically male. That was tough to wrestle with. But when I was able to get through that, I reached a point of saying, what if I embrace reality? What if I embrace what I just described that I am biologically male, that I am presenting in a more feminine way, and that people in my life love me.

Those are all principles that are so powerful. And by holding on to that, I don't have to be hurt by it because that's just the truth. This is fascinating. And I want to give a caveat. I'm almost certain you're going to agree with that. You know, your story is your story is one story is one story. And, you know, your perspective, you know, we can't, especially for Christians that aren't trans, they meet one trans person, especially if a trans person is maybe affirming some things that they agree with, like, see, this is what every person should say and think whatever. So I just, you know, this is, this is your story and that's all, that's all it is.

But I, I, I'm hearing you say that accepting the the the biological reality that you are male was actually more liberating for you rather than rather than the opposite to try to say i am a female and i want everybody else to affirm that that actually had a reverse effect when you were kind of wanting everybody else to affirm that, you to affirm that, but accepting the reality of your biology was actually more liberating. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely. And it was a mountain to get over. I don't want to diminish and sound like it was easy, but it's kind of like accepting your weaknesses. It's accepting that sometimes we're not the best singer or we're not the best runner and we might love those things. But if we pretend that we are a world-class singer, when really we're

mediocre, we're going to be hurt when people don't recognize us as being a world-class singer. And if I accept that I'm not biologically female and people are going to see that, then that's better than if I think I am biologically female, or if I were to think I am the most attractive person on the planet. people don't treat me like I'm the most attractive person on the planet and that's okay I'm still lovable but I need to be at peace with that that's interesting I noticed that you freely used your birth name Jason which most trans people say your dead name and in most circles that I'm from I mean that's kind of a really a big no, no, like you don't ever mention that, but you freely use it. Is that kind of for the same reason that for

most of your life you would say, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but like you were Jason, like that's this part of your, yeah. Well, I was, and I still am. I still am too, in a certain way. I, I do that for a few reasons. One of those is because I've come to a place where I'm okay with it. So it just doesn't really bother me. Another reason is out of respect for people in my family, like my parents and my sister. I know a few years into my transition, my sister once asked me, do we have to get rid of all of our old photos and stuff and put those away? And to me, I just was like, no, we have these lovely memories and we have all these things and that happened and we should cherish that and we should embrace that. i was jason with them and that's that's fine so i can i

can accept that and then the third piece of this and this will kind of come into my where we're going to go here but i now spend most of my time in very gender critical circles i've moved into a lot of a lot of religious circles but i've also moved into a lot of religious circles, but I've also moved into a lot of the radical feminist circles that are very trans negative. Can you explain gender critical and radical feminist? I know what you're saying, but for those who don't know, how would you describe it? Absolutely, yeah. So gender critical is a tough word because people use it in lots of ways. I consider myself gender critical in many respects in terms of not necessarily accepting the idea of detaching sex and gender as two disparate concepts.

But in this case, I'm using it more to refer to what would be classically known as a TERF or a trans exclusionary radical feminist. So these are the individuals who have almost made it their life mission to exclude trans women from everything. And they're at the forefront of that fight. Often it comes from a postmodern mindset of men have oppressed women and trans women from everything. And they're at the forefront of that fight. Often it comes from a postmodern mindset of men have oppressed women and trans women are men. And so they are kind of our oppressor mocking our form and taking our form. And it can go to some really nasty places online and in real life sometimes. And I spend a lot of time in these circles very intentionally because it's almost a mission place for me in a certain sense of how do we bring these conversations together? How do we find ways to be able to connect and still find where we, where we get along rather than be so divisive.

And so as part of that, I usually bring up my, my dead name, Jason, fairly early on, because one thing I've realized is that people who want to hurt me are going to look for ways that they can use weapons. And if I create something like you can't call me he, him, or you can't use Jason, well, I can't stop them. And they have a way to get at me. But if I put that out there and say, this is true, it's the same thing of accepting reality. It takes away that angle that they can use to kind of go after me. You're in ongoing dialogue with, I'll use the term gender critical feminists. So how has that gone? I mean,

I'm sure there's a wide range of different people, people that probably very, very loving and accepting of you. They just might not agree with certain things, you know, and other ones that might be much more hostile. Is that true? Is there kind of a wide range of personalities in those contexts? Totally. I mean, you can't have a conversation with someone who doesn't want to have a conversation with you. So that's my limitation. And there are certainly individuals out there who are actually hateful and who have no interest in connecting with me. So they exist. But I don't find that's most people.

I look at the divisions that we have in society right now on all fronts, including this one. And someone might make a rude, mean comment, but this person has a family. This person has kids. This person's capable of love. And I see what they post. And I think that's coming from a place of maybe misunderstanding. Probably it's coming from hurt, maybe fear, but there's something behind it there. And when I approach those individuals, I'm not looking to change their opinion. I'm not looking to debate. I'm looking to dialogue, to explore that and say, what's going on for you? I want to

hear it. And usually I find that is received incredibly powerfully. So a few weeks ago, I made a video about an individual who I don't know. This is someone who's gender critical and has quite a large following. She had made a pretty strong post about a particular trans celebrity and their transition. And it was strongly worded, but it was also about the way that their spouse and them had separated. And it was stuff I could relate to because it was kind of very similar to my life. And I thought, wow, this is a powerful moment. So I made a video and kind of didn't criticize her, but I talked about my experience there and how that played out with my wife and I, and this individual, I tagged her and she almost blocked me. She said, she, she saw the

tag and thought, Oh, trans person going to block. And then she watched my video and she almost blocked me. She said she saw the tag and thought, oh, trans person going to block. And then she watched my video and she responded thoughtfully. And then I responded thoughtfully. Can I ask who it was? Yeah. So her name is Audra Fassanelli. Oh, I don't know her. Okay.

She's in the States. And so all the way this leads to is we're not friends. We recorded a podcast together. I'm going to be putting out next week. And we continue to chat. I'm going to go see her sometime this summer, hopefully. And we've developed this friendship. And there's lots of things we disagree on, but we didn't even get into that in our conversation. It's more like, yeah, leading up to it, she told me she hasn't,

she hasn't had a conversation with a trans person in years. She told me that she has yet to encounter a trans person who she doesn't perceive as a narcissist. And so she's created this space because that's been her experience. And then I'll talk to trans people and they'll say similar things about those gender criticals because we've created this nasty discourse. And I'm sitting here thinking, these are all people capable of love. We just have to be able to talk. And I'm comfortable taking that first step. I'm comfortable saying, I'm going to assume the best in you. I want to come forward. And I get burned occasionally, but not very often. Not very often, I'm going to assume the best in you. I want to come forward. And I get burned occasionally, but not very often. Not very often, I find. And I listen to a wide range of people. So

naturally, I would listen to some gender-critical feminists. And the ones that I've read books on and listened to, it sounds like your friend. There might be some, absolutely some maybe ideological differences. But I haven't, again, the ones that I've, you know, read and listened to and even interacted with would say, I have, I have no problem with somebody living their life, transit, you know, like I have no problem with a trans person as a person. I'm going to give them honor and dignity. They should get housing. And, you know, they, they would have, I think the two things that I see is I don't want to be forced to kind of deny biological reality. If even if somebody else does, I, I not, I think, you know, there's the female body is kind of essential for the definition of what a woman is. And if somebody wants to live differently, I'm totally fine,

you know, but don't force me to embrace certain ideas that I don't agree with. And then also, obviously there's, you know, um, questions around, you know, uh, trans women and, and, and female sports and, you know, some social environments, bathrooms or whatever. And that's where, you know, there might be some differences as well, but in terms of just like maybe honoring the actual person, I, I don't, you know, someone like a JK Rowling would be a classic example. You know, she's been labeled a turf and all this't, you know, someone like a JK Rowling would be a classic example. You know, she's been labeled a turd and all this stuff, you know, I don't see personally like any hate coming from anything she's said. Um, maybe she's gone about it maybe a little, you know, salty way or whatever, but, but that's just kind of the nature of social media. I think, you know, people say things really, you know, whatever, but I, I do, I mean i mean i would let since i brought her up i mean she's a well-known figure obviously but i mean i i don't do you sense

like hate or transphobic vibes from her or i don't know well that's that's been part of my journey when i was going through my transformation here at the same time as she was coming out to speak about this so when she first started posting stuff and wrote her essay back in maybe 2020 whenever that was i read it and thought, oh, she's so horrible. This is so bad. She's so hateful. That was my take then. And then I've been working through stuff and it was just maybe two months ago. I was, as I'm in the circles I am now and I've been actually following her, I thought, I'm not so sure. So I went back and read the essay again and I was like, oh no, like I could write this essay now.

Like this could be something I would write. I don't see it the same way as I used to. I do agree with what you said, but maybe not always going about it in a way that promotes love because there are a lot of people who follow her who do take it to a hateful spot. Like when you described the gender criticals you've read, those are the people I'm connected with.

Those are the people I love. They're my friends. I stay with them when I go into different cities and kind of, you know, get together to work on things. But there are those who take it way further, who really do have disdain and contempt for me as an individual, not for the issues and the ideology, but it's not most people, right? Like I truly believe that there are hateful people on all ends of our political spectrum, but they're really, they're minorities. They're deeply hurting. I still think they can be helped. I've just, maybe if they're not, if they're not interested in coming to me with good faith to have conversations, there's not much I can do,

but I still have hope for them. Would you say, I mean, I, again, I'm probably throwing you a softball here, but your, your, your, your newer perspective on wanting to have good faith dialogue of accepting certain biological realities is that produced more happiness in your in your life like were you less happy when you were kind of needing maybe people to agree with everything you were saying and doing absolutely yeah well well the beautiful thing about trying to accept your strengths and your weaknesses and your limitations and your reality is that people can't people can't hurt you i know but when we before we got onto this recording here you talked about some of the

hate you've seen come towards me just on when you shared my video and it's brutal yeah the reality is the hate that i get comes in a few forms one of which is just saying things like you're a man and i'm like well that's you're not wrong so like it's not only viewed as hate it's just it's kind of rude like why are you mentioning it here when we all know that but it's it's fine it's reality so it doesn't get to me or they'll say things that aren't positions that i hold they'll say things like well you're a groomer and you want to convert our kids and stuff at which point that's kind of why i have my videos i can be like well actually here's a video where i spoke against that so that isn't my position but you're right that's a big concern and we should we should do something about that so it's kind of helps me navigate that by, by sticking to reality in a certain sense. That's interesting. Yeah. You kind of,

you kind of steal the, steal the power away from the things people can wield to try to hurt you. Are you still, what's your faith right now? Are you still, do you still identify as Christian or if it's personal, I don't, I don't need to know. Just curious. Like, no, totally. I, I've had a lot of conversations about that. So the, actually I would like to, before I answer that question, tell a bit more of my story because it will lead into that. So I'm going through this kind of transformation, getting my head to a much better spot. I then had a daughter and I had my daughter at 14 years old because she's my adopted daughter. She's actually my, um, my partner's little sister, but there's some issues in that household. And so we ultimately were able to get custody over her. So she came

to live with me and my wife, she's chronically ill. She actually got sick with COVID at the beginning and had the long haul COVID symptoms. So she was in bed for two years. And this is right at the time that I got my daughter. So I was the primary parent, and we've become very close in the years that I've had her. And when she was going back to in-person school, she was going to be going to a big city high school. Her birth family lived in a small town. So nothing like where I live now, but she was going to go to a big city high school with 2000 people. And she's very excited. And I was worried. I was nervous because I thought, are people not going to like her because she has a trans parent? And is that going to cause a

rift between her and I? Because I thought about when I was in high school and we would have just made fun of, you know, someone's transparent. We wouldn't have been comfortable with that. And so I was worried. She goes to high school and I quickly learned that we live in a very different world now. I live in a very liberal city here in Canada. And I was cool. I was cool being trans because that is very in, in a certain way. And so at first I felt awesome. I'm like, wow, this is, this is great. And then as I watched in that first year, she was in school, I saw a lot of the downsides of how we're hitting a point now where it is so cool to be trans or gay or have these identities that it's being taken, it's being adopted for individuals who maybe aren't dysphoric. And I noticed how it's leading people down paths that

can lead to regret and outcomes that's certainly not what anybody wants. I was wrestling with these ideas at the same time that a teacher named Carolyn Berjoski did a presentation at our school board. So she was a teacher almost at retirement and she presented to the board about some books that were in the library that she was concerned with. And we've all heard about the books, but her presentation was quite mild. It was a few books that she said these seem just too not age appropriate. These kids this age maybe shouldn't receive this message. She brought up one book that was glamorizing transition. It kind of spoke about it in a very, this is cool, this is fun, I'm finding myself, but maybe didn't talk about some of the risks and complications, which having been through a surgical transition, I believe are really important to talk about as part of the picture.

And in this presentation, she was shut down. The chair cut her off. They went to the newspaper, the board did. She was called transphobic. She was canceled in Canada at this point. And it's ultimately led to two lawsuits that are going through this year. One is a defamation suit and one is a judicial review. And this all happened in a school board election year for us.

And I knew that was an election year. And the moment I saw her presentation, I thought this is going to be bad because we're going to get the extremes on both sides coming out to our school board. And we're going to have the same thing we've seen play out in lots of American cities, which we did. And I decided to run as well as part of that because I am trans. So I understand that side. I do get progressivism and I get the needs of transgender people and the importance of maintaining dignity and respect. But I also understood her side. I thought she raised some valid points. And I think that we

can do better in promoting acceptance or we can do better in fostering acceptance of identity rather than fostering promotion, which is very much what I'm seeing in the system. So through this, I met Carolyn. She's now one of my closest friends. I was actually recording with her. I was chatting with her right before I got on the call with you here. And I met a whole bunch of other candidates who were running on both sides of this divide. And through that, I met one particular individual named Christina Fernandez. She's an evangelical Christian, and she was running for the school board as well. And as we got connected, she talked about her own faith journey and how she was reading your book, People to be Loved, that had been given to her by her pastor, because she had

questions for herself of how does she reconcile her faith with, in this case, it was about homosexuality, not about transgender individuals, but the whole complex world. So we actually read it together. We kind of went through it and discussed it. And that led me down this journey where I am now, where I'm speaking publicly, where I'm making videos and really trying to, in a sense, to put my life to what's now my mission field, which is bridging the gap, which is saying, how do we have the political conversations we need to have? How do we live in this world together, even when we might disagree? Because what I've seen on a school board, what I've seen in our politics has gotten so divisive, and so just non-functional. And I don't think I'm answering your question at all about faith. I've taken this

in an entirely different direction. You keep going, but I do want you to come back to the faith question if you're fine, but this is all great stuff though. This is super helpful. So it's gone down this crazy journey. I never saw, never saw for my life where people just aren't able to talk about this stuff and people are assuming the worst and every, and the other side, Christina and a lot of the other people in her group, they've never met a trans person because trans people are on the other side from them and they all assume the worst of each other. And I could come in and say, I agree with so much you have to say. And, and I'm trans and maybe we don't agree on stuff too, but we also agree on lots of things and maybe we can work together. And that has led to moving beyond just my city. So I talk at a lot of school boards across,

across the province at this point. And I'm also doing some stuff at the provincial level because we're just not able to have these conversations. So in the talks I had with Christina, so when I met her, we had this idea. We said, what if we record every conversation that we have? Because we didn't know each other yet. So from the time we met, we only talked on video or audio so we could record it for like, I don't know, 45 hours or so of conversation. So we get together and go through this journey

where we challenge each other and explore stuff. And faith came up a lot throughout that. My own faith journey was I, in university, I started working at a local church. It was called the Meeting House. It's a big church here in Canada and they operate at the movie theaters. You know, the Meeting House, you know. It's Brexie, right? and they operate at a movie theaters, you know, the meeting house, you know, Brexie, right?

Brexie Cavey. Yeah. Yeah. I know Brexie, uh, pretty well. So we, we operate out of movie theaters and the main church is in a different city. So in our city here, we had two movie theaters that every week we would get the sermon kind of broadcast into us. So I was in charge of logistics.

So I made sure that all of the tactical equipment was set up and the band was set up and all of our kids' rooms were set up and all the volunteers were scheduled and all of these things. And I loved it. And that was my community for many years as I was struggling with dysphoria. And I had a breaking moment in 2013. I'd been working there for about three years at that point. And my community was a lot of like 60 to 80 year olds. We had these home churches that we would partake in. And for whatever reason, my, my girlfriend, but she became my, my wife at the time, we, we found a home church. We loved that everybody was 60 to 80 years old, except for us. So we're like 20 and they're all way older. And it was wonderful because, you know, the wisdom you get from people who are in a different age bracket than you,

and these people kind of guided and, you know and shepherded us in terms of understanding life. And they were some of the kindest and most genuine people I knew. And then in 2013, Bruxy did a teaching about homosexuality. He did what he called the third way approach at that point. It was kind of a message of this doesn't need to be such a big deal. Maybe this isn't as important as the church has made it. What if we take a third way of love rather than being so focused on whether this is right or wrong? Both because I was in this particular home church and because I was on staff, I got to see the conversations that were happening in our church then.

If some of these people who had been kind of my role models, my elder role models leaving our church and being very upset that we could dare even talk and behind closed door, you know, they'd tell me how they really felt about how disgusting these people were that they would ever sleep with someone of the same sex or various things. And kind of like my childhood, it brought me back to that place of like, if that's them, they're not even trans. We're not even talking trans. We're just talking gay. If that's them for what they are, then what am I? And what would you think about me if you knew? And it kind of just built up the shame that was always there.

And for me, that was probably the biggest thing that rocked my faith was how do I reconcile this? How do I reconcile that these people who are so loving and so genuine and have been my community feel this way? And I went through a few years then that I was still at the church, but I wasn't, I was doing the motions.

I was doing the motions. I was more and more skeptical and angry, but it was my community. It was my family. When I transitioned, I had left the church for about a year and a half. My wife and I had moved to a different city and we ultimately just didn't really find a new church because we both weren't sure what to do about it. And then I transitioned and now I'm where I am now. So I have not gone to a church for six years. I don't think I've stepped into church for six years, but I've thought about it a lot. What's held me back now has been valuing authenticity

in a way that I didn't used to. I don't know how I feel about God. I don't know how I feel about Jesus. And before when I worked at the church, I was such an inauthentic person. It didn't matter. I could work there and be on staff and just say the right things and do the right motions and know that I was unsure how I felt.

Now, I can't do that. I don't know how to walk into that church and not be authentic. But it also feels disrespectful. To me, it feels disrespectful to do that when I don't know where I stand. And I've considered it actually a month ago. So I have the craziest conversations now. And I've considered it actually a month ago. So there's, I have the craziest conversations now and they're so wonderful. And two different people in one day invited me to a particular church in my city. One was because her daughter was being baptized there. So she invited me out to it. And another just out of the blue, she's like, you should come to church

this Sunday. They both go to the same church. And I thought, oh, if there's such a thing as a sign, this is a sign. And, and, and these are both, you know, anti-woke individuals. One of them was another trustee candidate. And one of them is someone who is quite cruel to trans people online. She once posted that she'll only, she refuses to use pronouns for any trans person except for Julia Malat is what she posted on Twitter once. Like these are, these are characters,

but, and I took that seriously. I really wanted to go. So I actually emailed the church because I kind of said like, look, I have these invitations. I'm trans. Because I know this church is also a pretty far right church. This is the one in our city that was shut down by the government for refusing to close during COVID. So they're pretty far right. And I thought, I've been invited. I would love to come. I'm not looking for acceptance. I'm not looking for anybody to, anything like that. But I just want to know where do you stand in terms of would you let me in the building? I don't want to show up and be walked out. I don't want to

create a spectacle. If you think this is powerful, if you take an approach like, well, like you describe in your book, if you take an approach where you would welcome me and you would have me, and you think that that could be beneficial for your, your community to experience me, I would be there. I would be there, but I don't want to cause something that you're not prepared to receive. And they, they didn't respond to my email and I've kind of been sitting ever since I've been like, maybe I, maybe I should follow up, but then do I have the guts to do that? I don't even know if I can handle that. So I've kind of been sitting ever since I've been like, maybe I, maybe I should follow up, but then do I have the guts to do that? I don't even know if I can handle that. So I've kind of, I don't know how to answer your question because I'm in an exploring place.

I'm in a, I don't know what my future holds. You answered it as honestly and authentically as anyone could. So thank you honestly for your just being so vulnerable and honest with where you're at. That's, that's really admirable. Which more Christians have that kind of honesty about where they're at. And that's unfortunate. I mean, cause I'm not hearing you say, I want to show up at your church and become a member and a leader and a deacon. You're saying, I just want to show up to the building and how would that go? You know, like, and, um, yeah, that's, that's, I'm sorry. They haven't

responded and I hope, I hope they do. Cause that silence can speak a lot and that's that's i'm sorry they haven't responded and i hope i hope they do because that silence can speak a lot and that's that's unfortunate you mentioned i do have so i've got a list of thoughts and questions i would love and i know some of them but some of them actually i have no clue what you would say to it you mentioned kind of in passing i think offline and online about like teens and and the whole trans conversation because that's a big topic right now, especially in the state. Well, I would say in Canada as well, right. That you obviously, you know, you have these explosive numbers of, of teens, especially biological females identifying as trans and many of them are pursuing, you know, social hormonal or even surgical transitioning when they're of age.

What do you, what are your thoughts on that? I heard, I mean, I sensed that you were somewhat concerned about that. Can you expand on what are your thoughts on that? I mean, I sensed that you were somewhat concerned about that. Can you expand on what are your thoughts on kind of this? Yeah. Well, I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So another part of my journey that I haven't explored yet was with my mother. So my mom is a very strong evangelical Christian. She's been for a long time in her life. And so this was very difficult for her when I came out. And as we did some Christian counseling together for a little while, and as we worked into kind of starting to find some common ground and some places where we could connect, we talked about reading some books. But she drew a line of saying, I will not read non-Christian books. She just doesn't really read them because she's,

to be honest, I think a little bit afraid of her faith being challenged. So she wasn't going to read any book about trans matters that wasn't Christian based. And Embodied didn't exist at that point. So we couldn't read that one, but she sort of said this to me. I said, great, well, let's read the Christian ones together. So I know we read Mark Yarhurst's book. That was kind of the main one that I got. And then a few others. And in the end, my mom never read them. She couldn't bring herself to do that. So that was hard for me, but I read them because I love reading. So I read Mark Yarhurst's book and I know he describes kind of these different frameworks for how you might kind of conceptualize what's going on. And one

was the disability framework and one was the diversity framework. And that stuck with me. That's been really formative in terms of how I view this, that I perceive myself as having a disability of some kind. I don't know why I feel this way. I can't fully explain it. But for whatever reason, whether it's biological, whether it's purely psychosocial, for whatever reason, I feel the way that I do and it causes distress. And I think it's compassionate to reduce stress.

And I think that there's a lot of things there, but I do think it's important to hold onto the idea that something is not right. Something is not right. And that's what we're trying to do is resolve that unlike the diversity perspective, which is to say kind of the find an identity, whatever feels fulfilling and that's empowering. I don't accept that. I think that transitioning is dangerous. Transitioning is expensive. Transitioning has a lot of downsides. Transitioning might leave you disappointed. It certainly will leave you infertile. There's a lot of reasons to not encourage it. If a kid can prosper and do well and not transition, that's the future I want for them. If any kid comes and says, I'm gender dysphoric,

I feel like I need to transition, I want to see a world where we see if we can avoid doing the transition. And if we can't, I think it's a better solution than the many negative ways it can go. And so that's always been my position. And that's where we used to be as a country. 2017 for us is when it changed in Canada, because there's a center called CAMH, which is where you go through for all of the kind of overseeing surgeries and stuff in Ontario. And they had a transformation in terms of their leadership. Ken Zucker, the researcher who had let it disappeared, and some new individuals came in. And we've gone to a place where you can't question and you can't challenge. So if a student does come to you now in school and says, I feel this way, the teachers can't question it. And they don't even tell the parents, in fact, if the kid

doesn't want their parents to know, which means the parents may not know, which means the parents can't work with the medical community to figure out what the best password is. But even if they did in Ontario, the medical community can't question it because we don't allow that either. So it's kind of, you have to just affirm for the sake of affirmation. And I do think that that is damaging. And when you described rapid onset gender dysphoria and a lot of that, I've seen it. I suspected it in those early days when I saw it at my daughter's school and thought, this doesn't seem right. Like when I was a kid, they said maybe one in 2000 to one in 5,000 people are trans, we don't really know. And that was probably underreported because it wasn't well talked about, but 39% of my board now identifies as LGBT and 39% is a lot. And I see it with the

excitement. I had one trans person in my city who described to me, I'm not gender dysphoric, but I'm gender euphoric. I was okay, but now I feel even better. And I'm like, you're describing it the way we describe drugs at this point. Like this is a very different world than the way I would look at it with that disability framework. So the other piece I would say that plays into it for me and my position is I'm now very, very involved in this community. I have this wonderful network of support around me, including the doctors and the researchers and the psychotherapists who are working across this continent really on these matters. And so I've been connected with the detransitioners. I know them personally now,

and I understand that harm can be caused when you transition somebody who this isn't right for, who will regret it. And so while I certainly have empathy for individuals who might benefit from transition, I have to hope we can find a path forward that doesn't catch everybody else in the crossfire because transitioning kids who are going to regret it is bad. Not transitioning kids who desperately need it may also be bad. There's got to be a solution that looks at both of these sides. Right, right. No, that's really helpful. As you can gather from my books, I try to just avoid the polarized perspectives. Usually they just misrepresent the other side. It becomes so heated. Nobody's trying to understand each other. So I'm constantly trying to say, or the phrase, I'm constantly trying to steel man the other view that I find initially. I don't

think I agree with that, but what is the best case for that? So I've tried that in my books, especially on sexuality and gender. I'm entering into a conversation that is distant from me i don't have these personal experiences so i have to work extra hard to try to get inside the mind and heart and bodies of people who are holding viewpoints that i don't initially agree with i'm like okay well what what is the best case for this having said all that and i've got you know several friends like you who if we can be friends now um yeah have transitioned. And they were like, this was kind of like a last-ditch effort to kind of survive. I know that can be thrown around too haphazardly.

This is a way to survive. But for them, it was an excruciating decision that was so difficult. And for a few people that I'm thinking of in particular, like it did alleviate this debilitating distress. And that doesn't answer the ethical questions of transitioning, but it certainly is relationally, you know, is impactful. And but so here's what I'm trying to say. Like when it comes to the teen conversation, this explosive rise in numbers and And I think seeing people so quickly diagnosed with gender dysphoria and teens, I have four teenage kids and I'm around teenagers all the time. Teenagers are teenagers. My gosh, like they're one day they're this, another day they're that. And, you know, they are deeply impacted by their social environment. I know that's a huge

debate. And, you know, is there a social contagion and, and gender identities? And here's, here's my, here's what I want to say. I'm, I'm, I am deeply even having trying to see another side. What's the argument counter argument. I'm still very deeply concerned with how youth culture is in many, some cases, maybe in many cases, kind of glamorizing, um, transitioning or different gender identities. It's, it's one thing to kind of likeorizing transitioning or different gender identities. It's one thing to kind of, like in my high school days, we had like, we had, you know,

different groups and trends and, you know, the emos and the jocks and the hicks and the neo-hippies, you know, and they go out on their VW buses and smoke weed and, you know, during lunch or whatever. And like, we had all, you know, these kinds of groups and personalities and, but none of it was medicalized, right? Like none of this was, you can become an emo and you might have to like, you might have some extra piercings or something that when you're, you know, 42, you might regret, I don't know. But like, but this is just different that you, now you you're faced with these irreversible surgeries that it does seem that there is a growing number of regret happening,

that there is a growing number of regret happening, especially in, in among females in their early twenties who are now like, golly, like I made some decisions and my medical caretakers didn't seem to be really looking after me and for my holistic wellbeing. So all that, that's where I'm coming from. I am. Yeah. I'm very concerned about what's going on with, with the teen conversation, even though I have tried to understand like, okay, what's the other side and so on. So, okay. So you mentioned detransitioners. Do you see, and I don't think there's a hard, a lot of hard data on this, but do you see a growing number of detransitioners or transition regret, especially among younger people than there ever has been before? Or. Yeah, I think it's, it's a complex question because it's changed so quickly, the rapid onset we're talking 2017 onwards.

So we're not talking a long period to know where it's going to go. But I think we've seen some of it. I think it's also a challenging conversation because are you talking about desisting or are you talking about detransitioning? And to describe those, desisting is usually referring to people who start down a path. They maybe take on an identity and then they go, ah, maybe not. And detransition is like, you did something. You're in the process of defining it, I guess. But yeah. So what's the difference between desisting and detransitioning?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So desisting is going to be, you, you kind of claim an identity. I am now trans or I am a this or I'm a that. And then you desist, you stop. You'd be like, maybe I'm not that. So the damage, if there's any, would be purely emotional, mental damage, because nothing has happened yet. You've just tried on that hat, so that didn't work and took it off again. I don't think that's harmful. I think that we all explore ideas, much like with faith. We've probably all tried on a place of, do I really believe? And you kind of try that hat on, and then you land on believing, and you land on not believing, and that strengthens you. But when you get to the place of actually taking medical hormonal surgical steps

that's detransitioning because now you can you can change i can go back to being jason but i no longer have a penis and i'd have breasts i would have to deal with and there's a lot of things that would have implications there that detransition is going to be expensive. It's going to have more medical risk and certain things like the ability to produce testosterone will never come back to me naturally. And so those things are, and I'm infertile and those things cannot be, cannot be backed out. And so that's where you get a lot more devastation. That has been a lot of the angle that I've been working at this from is that socially transitioning is not a neutral act. I mentioned earlier that in school boards in Ontario, every school board has a policy that if a

kid comes to the teacher and says, I want to transition, this could be a young kid, this could be an old kid, but it could be an eight-year-old who says, I want to be, you know, it's a boy, I want to be Jennifer and be called she, her, this school will do it. But not only that, if the kid says, and I don't want you to tell mom and dad because I'm uncomfortable with it, they won't tell the parents. They'll call them that name. But when they call home, they'll refer it back to Timothy. And on the report card, they'll put Timothy. And they're almost taking a step to exclude the parents. And the argument here has been, it's neutral. It doesn't matter. It's like make-believe, right? It's like the kid being a superhero in the yard will let them do their thing. And I don't accept that because of what I experience and see

with these children and what I experienced with myself, which is when you go down that path of starting to transition, especially if you do it when you're older, if you're 10, 12, 14, you're forming an identity around it. Everybody knows you as that person. Your teachers know, every classmate knows, and you're going to have to back out that identity. That can be hard. There was a young adult who I worked with a few years ago, and he was, I think, 17 at the time. And he was gay. And when I say he was gay here, what I really mean is he was, that's all he was. His identity was being gay. And I had coffee with him to get to know him once in a few hours. And I kind of said like,, what else, what else do you have going on besides being gay? Because that's all you talk

about. And he was kind of like nothing, like his friends are gay circles. His life is being gay. That is his identity. And a few months later, he confides, I don't even know if I'm gay anymore. Like, I'm not sure, but I can't, I can't let go of this because this is my identity, right? That's who I am is being gay. It's not just, I used to like volleyball. Now I don't play volleyball. It's this is my everything is being gay. And that's a risk when people start to go down a transitionary path. And the other risk that I experienced is when you start to transition, you want to stay in those circles where you feel affirmed, where you get the name and pronouns you want. So you're going to feel uncomfortable at home. If you get that at school with your teachers, you get that with your friends and you don't get that with

your parents, you're going to end up feeling separated from your parents and feeling closer to those other circles, which creates a division. And that's inevitable if you're going to transition and you have someone like a parent who's not affirming, but with the policy our schools have, you're not even giving those parents a chance. Maybe they would work. Maybe they'd work with clinicians who knows where they would go, but we're kind of just saying, nope, we're not even giving those parents a chance. Maybe they would work. Maybe they'd work with clinicians, who knows where they would go, but we're kind of just saying, nope, we're not even going to involve them. And so that's been my concern is some of those policies around it, because I do think it's complex. I get to work with so many kids and parents now because they come in

and find me and the stories are heartbreaking because they almost always go like this. A parent calls me up and says, my kid has come out as trans. They're often, there's a shocking number of people who overlap with autism or other comorbidities. And they'll spend the first three minutes justifying to me, but I'm not transphobic. I'm not, I love my kid no matter what. I will support my kid if they want to transition as an adult. Like, I love my kid.

I'm just worried because I know my kid and I know this from when they were seven. I know this from when they were 10 and they explained to me why they have concerns this might not be right, but they feel the need to justify because they're so used to being told, well, if you don't accept, you're transphobic.

Maybe you shouldn't be a parent because you don't love your kid. And it's just, it's heartbreaking. Yeah, this is so helpful. Like I, the number one question I'm getting more recently. And, and, and when I speak on the topic is from parents who have a kid who would be classified as, you know, rapid onset, you know, they, they maybe have no prior history of gender dysphoria. Then, you know, the kid's 15 or whatever. They're in a social environment where it is uh it yeah where it's and i want to be careful my words here i don't want to just say like trendy but it's um it can uh elevate social

status say to um maybe identify as trans or non-binary and they come out you know as trans almost out of nowhere and then um they're you know demanding parents have to affirm everything not just abide by but actually believe everything i'm saying about myself. And the parents like, what do I do if I don't, I feel like my kid's just going to cut off the relationship, but I can't like affirm all these things, you know? And like, I don't want to agree to, you know, hormone therapy. What do you tell a parent in that situation? Like how does, how should that parent respond to say a younger-ish teen who is not just coming out and identify as trans, but is kind of demanding kind of full affirmation? Yeah.

Million dollar question. I don't know. Well, I don't think there's one answer, but I'll answer it in a roundabout way. Cause I look at my experience and as my mom and I have chatted now, of course I didn't come out until I was 28. So I was not a teenager at the time, but she tells me, you know, there were no signs. She had no idea that this was going on for me. And I think it would have been different if I was a teenager now based on everything I show, because I kind of hear that and think, okay, that's because people weren't talking about it.

But you took me to four counselors before the age of grade seven, because I had, could not be friends with the boys. You know, this is pictures of me in kindergarten sitting like, you know, this, I put up a fit once because i couldn't have a particular girl shirt in grade one from the store like there was a lot of things that were there that were not being looked at but you know to my mom there were no signs so i think in some cases maybe there were signs but then i also look at myself i'm very aware of gender and sexuality with everything i go through and i look at my daughter now and she is very feminine she's very girly she continues to be obsessed with One Direction. She's actually going to see one of the One Direction guys tonight at a concert in Toronto. And like, she's just, she's so stereotypically

everything that world. If she suddenly came to me today and said, I think I'm trans, I would have a hard time believing it. Everything I know about what it is to be trans and everything I know about how that tends to proliferate. I wouldn't, I of course would love her. I of course would want to explore it with her, but I wouldn't, I'd have a hard time believing it, that it wasn't all of her friends are going down this path or something like that. So I think it's, it's challenging. You, you gotta, you've got to know your kid.

How susceptible is your kid to following the crowd? Where are the crowds going? And mostly what are they looking for in it? And the one pattern that I've seen, because I see a lot of kids who are wanting to or transitioning, is does this make it better for them? There's one class who are happy because of it, and they really genuinely are. And there's a whole other class who are not happy. It almost looks like it has made them more miserable. it almost looks like it has made them more miserable.

And I think in some ways it does because then they go into the victim mentality because then they go into the, I'm in this oppressed group. And the world is horrible to me. Mindset that is can exist in these spaces and can be very toxic rather than saying, I had this deep dysphoria and now I don't have so much dysphoria. And that's, that's so much better for me. And with the kids that I see, there's one kid in particular that my daughter is friends with and, and he is biologically female, um, goes by a male name

and pronouns. And he's at my house quite a bit. And this kid felt very different from many of the other teenagers I would see in that he doesn't make a big deal of his transition. So we've talked about it a few times because he knows the stuff that I'm doing and the things he's echoed to me is stuff like, well, I am trans, but it's not really an identity. It's just kind of a fact about me. And he's like, I don't really want to talk about it with most people because it's just, it's pretty unimportant, right? It's just, it's just what I am. And he's 17 now and he's not even on blockers or hormones. And we talked about that and he said, that's a big decision. Like, you know, I would love it. I'm excited. But at the same time, like, I don't want to rush into these things and very principled, very rational about it. And of all the kids I've

seen that my daughter's connected to, I think he's the one I'd be most comfortable going forward with. I'm like, I see a lot of benefit. This kid is principled. This kid is doing so much better because of the transition. But then there's others who it's almost like they're more angry and they're more driven to kind of a deeper ideological position over seeing any benefit for them. Yeah. Do you see then, I know it's just say everything we're talking about is going to be debated, right? And heated and people are going to disagree. So the whole idea of social contagion, do you see with teenagers, would you agree that there is some level often of social influence in the growing number of teens identifying as trans? Absolutely.

To me, it's not a debate, really. And I don't look to debate people, but I struggle to see how one couldn't see that as an element. I don't think it's all of it. I think dysphoria exists. I think that there's a lot of things playing in here. But I really struggle when someone tells me that they don't think that has anything to do with anything. When they tell me that, no, this many people have always been trans or felt trans. And now that it's accepting, we have this flood. I don't buy it the same way I don't buy it with

homosexuality either, in the sense that there's some people who deeply, deeply feel this in such a way that they were willing to do it when it was illegal. They were willing to do it when it was highly stigmatized. But now that it is so available, and at least in liberal cities like where I am, it is so normal and it's so accepted. There's lots of people who are heading down that path and they're kind of like, yeah, I'm bi, I could do either, but I'll do this way. That's fine. I do believe that for society to work, we have to let people do what they want to do. But that's a very different bar than where it started, which was these people deeply feel this and they need this and they can't make any other relationship worth. And then there's this other

group that's like, yeah, I kind of, I could, I could make anything worth work. And since I can, I'm going to choose to take it in this way. And that's what I see with the gender transitions. But it's very different because the medical implications we've talked about, this is not sexuality. This is body modification. Which, so would you, if, if a teenager was coming to you for advice saying, Hey, I think I want to transition hormonally and or surgically, well, you can't give a one size fits all response. That's not fair. But, um, in general, would you caution, like, would you, would you encourage them to kind of wait until they're an adult?

Or again, I'd say, yeah. It's such an interesting question, right? Because I would mostly, I think there's a lot of reason to wait until you're cognitively at a place that you can really know the decision that you're making. until you're cognitively at a place that you can really know the decision that you're making. But at the same time, the argument for it has often been passability, especially for trans women, people like me, you know, I would pass if I had gone ahead when I was 14. And by pass, I mean, you know, I could blend in in such a way that I wouldn't stick out. And for me, I found empowerment by sticking out, not that I like it, but it creates that authenticity.

And for me, I found empowerment by sticking out. Not that I like it, but it creates that authenticity. One weird thing I discovered was when I went into this, I thought I have to pass. I'm doing this to pass. And if I don't pass, then I'll end it. When I actually got into it and found authenticity, I realized, oh gosh, if I pass, then my relationships will be just as inauthentic because I'll meet you on the street and you're not going to know that I am biologically male. And I'm going to just make up the first 20 years of my life and be like,

oh yeah, blah, blah, blah. And now I'm just living inauthentic relationships in a very different way. And I probably form more shame around, but I'm not really this, I can't have babies and all these things and just create my own different mental health situation for myself. And so that's the argument though, is, is the possibility of it. And I don't think possibility should be so important, but I get why it is because we do live in a world where the challenges that I do face for being trans are pretty much exclusively centralized around whether I, whether I pass or not. And so I understand why people make that so important. And I do think that the, the other side of's going to be another side, can play both cards

sometimes that we want to restrict transformers from all these places. We want to prevent you from doing all these things. And we want to make sure you can't transition young enough that you'd be able to pass and be able to do those things. So it's kind of like when you push both at the same time, it does create a bit of an inimical position. I guess I would love to see a world where we don't transition children because we don't think transition is... It's the path we go to when we need to. So we wait for adulthood. We

try to avoid it where possible. But we're also compassionate enough as a society then that someone can prosper and live the way I'm living rather than feeling that they have to pass in order to be able to live their life. Yeah, totally. Totally. That's, that's super helpful. Can you, um, maybe summarize your five minute video on, on pronouns or I just, I found it your, every line in that video is so good. And so I, are your videos just on Twitter or other, other places? That's just where I watch them. I started on Twitter because that's just where all of these political conversations play out. I'm posting them to YouTube now on this channel that I don't really know how

to use. My daughter shows me how to use these platforms, but I just kind of stick them up there because I don't know where Twitter is going. I kind of feel like it's going to fall off a cliff in the next six months. And I'll be like, Oh, all my stuff's gone.

So I'm looking to get out of Twitter, but Twitter is kind of where most of my stuff is currently happening. But I do have a YouTube page under a lot of Malata that has kind of all of my video sequence there. Um, I would love to describe my video, except I'm actually not sure which video you're referring to. Cause I have three pronoun videos. Oh gosh. Okay. Well, just say, I'd get, just give us your thought, not forget about the video. Just like, what are your, what are your thoughts on the whole pronoun question should uh people use trans persons trans persons pronouns uh how should trans people think through pronoun use is there ever a time when you would say maybe somebody

shouldn't use somebody else's pronouns maybe like okay with a younger kid or yeah yeah yeah so i like all of this i've gone on these incredible journeys that never, never seemed to end for me. So I went through that phase of, I want my pronouns and I'm going to be really hurt if I don't get them. And I'm going to blame you for it. I'm going to say that Preston has hurt me because Preston did not, you know, call me she, her. And then I hit that place of realizing that doesn't work. That's me putting, that's me putting it all on you. That's me kind of saying, I have a bubble here that needs to be maintained and you're responsible for maintaining my version of reality I've created for myself. And for me, that came with a realization of the importance of free speech and of not having compelled speech. That I don't think we're in a safe spot when we force people

to speak a certain way. And in Ontario, we have a law that actually is Canada that has a law that would require that. So if somebody doesn't call me, you know, she, her at work, they could be gone after. And amazingly, it doesn't even have to be by me. It could be someone else who overhears it. And it's like, you know, Julia goes by she, her, and you're calling, you know, Julia, he, him behind their back. And I'm upset about that. So I'm going to go to HR. And chances are they wouldn't do anything if I didn't care. But the law is written in such a way that it could lead to some really tough situations like that. So there's been a lot of pushback saying compelled speech is bad.

That's not a good spot to be. And I have to agree with that, that that's a problematic place to be. So kind of where I've landed is I choose to use the pronouns that people prefer, because I think that's a nice gesture. I know how it can hurt. I've been in that place where it can hurt and I don't want to hurt people. So I do my best. And I do think that trans people are better when they accept the reality, when they can work through that and not be so hurt and not be so torn down if they don't get what they want in terms of pronouns but i also don't think it's my place to to force that upon people and to make people face that i also know that's not how they're going to learn that lesson if they if they want to get to a place where they have that kind of where they can handle

that it's not going to happen by me actively choosing not to refer to them the way they want it's just kind of a feels like a mean thing to do in that respect and i know some people will say to me no it's but it's reality but it's reality, but it's, it's accepting reality. And actually I have a friend who... You're lying to, I always get like a Christian circles are like, well, that's, that's lying. Like I can't, I use somebody's pronoun. How do you respond to that? Do you feel like it's lying? Yeah. So I had the most surreal experience on this a few months ago. I went to Ottawa. So that's six hours from where I live to see someone named Chanel Fall. ago. I went to Ottawa. So that's six hours from where I live to see someone named Chanel Fall.

She's somebody in this space. She's a teacher in Canada here. She was canceled a few years ago. She posted some stuff about critical race theory in a private teacher's Facebook group. This ended up getting out and she had a complaint with the College of Teachers about it. And she had to fight this in court because, and the stuff she said was very, it was basically like about Black Lives Matters and Black Life Matters. And she kind of said, like, I think we should focus on making sure all kids feel comfortable rather than worrying about these particular issues. And someone zeroed in and said, no, like you, it was very extreme in my opinion. So since that time, she's become a very public voice on a lot of these matters and we've become friends.

So I went up there to record a podcast with her. And so it was me and Chanel and our friend Catherine who leads something called Lighthouse Forums in Canada, which is a network of kind of classical liberal thinkers and trying to find ways to change the way we're having these discourses. And on this podcast, they both referred to me as she, her. And it played out the way that I love my relationships playing out, which is we've never talked about it. I don't have pronouns in a certain sense. I don't list it anywhere. I've never asked to be called anything. They never asked what I wanted to be called. If people take a stance, I'm going to call Julia, he, him, whatever. I can, I can deal with that. But, but they both called me, she, her, we put out our video and they got immense pushback. This is kind of a waking up moment

for the two of them that they actually have a certain portion of their following that took the position of like, no, you never, ever call a trans person she, her. And so there's all of these big attacks for like three days. And it was weird because it wasn't towards me. It was about me. Like no one was attacking me, but they're all attacking. Like I'm being listed and named as people are debating me and whether you can call me she, her or not. And Chanel came up with the best response that I've ever seen on this. And she's like, you know, I don't walk into my friend's house

and look at their potted plant and say, that is a fake plant. That is not a real plant. And I must let you know that I am not convinced that that is a real plant. Like when someone has a fake plant for decor, we all know it's fake and we just, we might just call it a plant. And that's how I view this space here of for both of them. They kind of clarified their position to me that one of the reasons they're comfortable calling me she, her is because they know I accept my biological reality. They, they know that I know that and they know that this makes me feel better, which it kind of does and it's workable.

And they don't really view me as a man entirely because I'm very feminine in a lot of ways but they know i'm not biologically female and it just kind of it just kind of works but but there isn't any denying of biological reality going on there they're not they're not perpetuating that and i have a lot of respect for that and i related to that plant analogy of the same thing if i was actually trying to pass off a fake plant as real to you maybe you'd feel differently but you're not going to come into my house either. And just be like, I need to point out everything here to make sure we're on the same page. Cause what if you think, I think this is like, it's just, it's ridiculous. And I kind of view it in those terms of, I don't know. I think I'm rambling at this point. No, that's, that's really helpful. Actually. I mean, again, I, I think sometimes people don't

appreciate the complexity of language in this conversation too. Language is really, it's very socially shaped and words change meaning. And you can even have the same word that means something different, different cultures. I mean, football in the UK is different than football in America and, you know, pants in America is different than pants in the UK is underwear.

You know, like I remember I lived there for a few years and you know, one of the few days it was over 70 degrees in Scotland. I remember, you know, thinking, oh, it's nice out. I'm not going to wear pants. And everybody thought I just told them I wasn't wearing my underwear. You know, like those are kind of low level, I guess, examples. But they kind of, you know, illustrate the point.

The language is flexible, you know, and, you know, my language reflects my belief system. Right. And so I use pronouns, you know, know for me like they refer to biological sex but somebody else pronouns might refer to gender identity and i might totally disagree with gender identity whatever you know but like what are you gonna do walk around the world demanding everybody agrees with your worldview and uses language that reflects your worldview it's like well no i my language reflects my worldview um i can't pretend I can't change that, but I can meet someone where they're at, you know, and language is shared social space. So you have person a over here, person B over here, person A says pronouns match biological

biological sex. Person B says, no, they match gender identity. And we can just argue back and forth over all this stuff, or somebody has got to kind of give in and meet the other person where they're at. Um, and so I've just taken a position, you know, that like, as a Christian, we as an act of hospitality, I'm going to meet someone where they're at, use the pronouns they want me to use, not because I need to agree with everything that that comes with, but just as a gesture of hospitality. But yeah, I don't know. That's how I feel. And that's, you know, I, I, by one caveat,

I think going back to our discussion with young teens and, and this, this social environment, I would say if you're a parent with a younger, let's just say, I don't know, arbitrary age of maybe 15 or younger, and you suspect there might be some social influence here. They come home and demand to be called different pronouns, whatever. As a parent, an authority figure, if you affirm their social transition that you suspect might be socially influenced, I think there's a place for a parent to say no to that. Because you know the studies. I mean, if somebody is totally affirmed in their social transition, that can easily lead to hormonal and surgical down the road. And that's where I would be really, you know, social transition is easy. You can, you know, you can reverse it within a second, you know, okay. I no longer, you know, um, but the hormonals and surgical stuff, that's when, especially

for, you know, kids under 18, I'm going to say, I'm going to want to not do something that's going to encourage that kind of decision at that age. So, and you know, again, it's still case by case. I know some parents that the relationship with their kid is so fragile, right? Where they just, they just need to, they might need to be putting band-aids on certain relational things just, just to maintain some kind of relationship. And so I, there is no one size fits all. And that's what we do in all of our, all of our relationships though, right? It's not a formula. It's not like you meet someone and say, this is how I do friendship. No, you, you meet someone and you, you figure out, and that's the beauty of it. And you touched on, you touched on language

there. And I think the one thing I would add is that language is also there to communicate that that's why we do it so that we so that we can get ideas back and forth. And in that respect, you can use that to argue either way of pronouns or trans woman, woman, or whatever. And the trans woman or woman or not woman thing, I find super interesting in that respect, because it's mostly just people arguing about, yeah, wanting their definition. And there's a researcher, Carleen Gribble in Australia, who I've connected with, and she has this great paper that she sent me and said, like, read this paper. And it's talking about language and the way that we're changing it. And her paper talked about some of the challenges

of when we take away the word women and, you know, we use birth or menstruate or some of the things that can come out of that. But at the top of the paper, even just the word women, she identified how it used to mean biological sex. Then you get the postmodern deconstructive angle coming in that uses it for gender. And I think there's a place for both. It really, it meant both previously and they weren't separated before. The distinction didn't matter so much. Now the distinction does matter a bit more. And I don't think either one is an invalid use of the word women. You can put an argument forward for either, but if you and I are going to communicate, we have to at least be on the same page. Because if we're not talking about the same thing with it, then we can't communicate. So when people say

to me, like, well, are you a woman? I'm kind of like, well, how do you define a woman? If you're going to define a woman biologically female, then no, I'm not a woman. If you're going to define woman as someone who fills that role in society, then I kind of am right now. And I don't think one definition is right or wrong. And I will happily morph to whatever definition you want in our conversation, because for me, the purpose is to communicate, not to latch on and say, this is how we must interpret that word. And if you have really strongly, I must interpret it this way, then okay, I can work with that.

That was on my list of questions I was going to ask. I was going to go down the list of all the controversial, you know, uh, the whole, you know, trans women are women. So you would say, well, you would say it depends on what do you mean by, if, if, if by women, you mean adult, adult female, then no, that's biologically true. But, and that's where you got to look at how are we using those words though? And what's, what's most useful. Like if somebody's, if I'm in a crowd and you're trying to tell someone who Julia is

and point me out, like you might say, you know, the, the, the trans person, the trans woman over there, that would make sense. Right. Because there's 50 people and that's, that's a good way to identify. Just like if somebody is six foot four or somebody is anything, you might be like the tall one, the one who's wearing the pink shirt. So I think that's, I think that that's fine. And people get so caught up on all of these things. And I think we're also teaching that too. I had this funny experience with my daughter once where

I was dropping her off at school and her friend was coming across the street in front of us with a whole group of people. And I hadn't met her friend yet. So she's like, oh, there's, I'll make up a name. There's Jennifer. oh cool which one's jennifer and as it turns out jennifer is black but you know she's been taught we don't say those sorts of things though right so she's like describing her with all these other things that are completely unhelpful because it's a bunch of teenage girls who are you know all similar height and wearing similar things and all this and then finally when i find out which one i'm like you could have said she was black but it's like no we don't we don't say those things i have to pretend i don't see it

right i have to pretend that i can't tell that that she's black and but it's like, no, we don't, we don't say those things. I have to pretend I don't see it. Right. I have to pretend that I can't tell that, that she's black. And I'm like, no, it's not, we're not making that her identity. We're not saying everything about her is that she's black. We're just, that's helpful. And I view it the same way here of like, there's lots of reasons to call me a woman because there's a lot of ways where that is my role in society now, but there's also a lot of reasons not to call me a woman. And I, let's just look at the context rather than be all like, nope, this is the answer.

In almost every conversation I have within the trans or even sexuality conversations, I feel like the first five minutes is, okay, well, what do you define that? What do you mean by that? What do you mean by, because so many times you get people that are just like two ships passing in the night

because they're just using terms differently. And if we could just define our terms up front, we could probably have an actual profitable conversation. Okay. Another controversial question. What about trans women in female sports? Do you have opinions on that? Oh gosh, that one.

See, these are all the ones I haven't made videos on yet because I'm like, these are the ones I'm working towards. And I'm fine if you're like, I haven't thought through it enough to give a strong opinion. Well, I will say on that one, like there's lots of things I don't know. And I am not athletic. So it's one of those issues that like, not that I don't care about, but it doesn't affect me personally. I know that we all have our biases and their angles and I'm not competitive.

I would never win anything in sports. So it's not like I, that's not a world that I feel deeply connected to. If a trans woman can't do sports because that's, that's basically our position. I don't have a lot of skin in the game on that decision. So in that one sense, I maybe am less empathetic towards it than some, but I've had this conversation with so many researchers and interesting people. And like the things that I hear that I think have merit is one, there's probably not a one size fits all rule because sports are different, right? Not all sports benefit by physical strength. Some all sports benefit by physical strength.

Some sports immensely benefit by physical strength. So those things matter. They play into it. And I had a conversation with someone once and they said, when it comes to sports and prisons and a lot of the really controversial matters, these institutions didn't work before. And maybe the problem is deeper than the surface now. And I love prisons for that example, because there's big concerns with taking someone who is biologically male and maybe isn't there for rape or other crimes like that, and suddenly putting them in a female prison. That's very concerning. And we have that happening sometimes. And that scares me. But at the same time, prisons haven't worked for a long time. Like, why does anybody ever get raped at a prison?

Why does anybody ever get killed at a prison? Like 60% of assaults in female prisons come from the guards. Like, why is that happening? Like the system we've created doesn't work. There's deep systemic problems. And while I think this is also a problem to latch on, like this is the whole problem, but it didn't work. The system's broken. And I think sports in some ways to me leads to that same place of like, what are we even trying to do with sports? Like to me, there's sports for the sake of physical

activity and camaraderie and there's sports for the sake of like intense competition. And in that first category, I'm like, what's the big problem? If I was going to go and play volleyball, I would be horrible at it. You know, I'm not a threat. And so how can you really tell me that I can't play with a bunch of women who might be the ones who I'm friends with and who I connect with? Where's the problem there? But if I'm a world class racer, that might be a different situation now because my height and my muscle, you know, the bone density that I've developed having gone through a male puberty might actually have a benefit there. And then that does seem unfair. But then I go to this place of like, but isn't that the whole thing of sports to begin with? Like every man who wins races is African because physiologically they have an advantage

compared to non-African men. And we know exactly what that is physiologically speaking. And, but we don't have white and black competitions to make sure that white men can win too. We say, no, if we're trying to find the fastest person, they, they actually, they happen to be African black. And that's just the way that humans are. And so in that sense too, it's kind of like, so what is the point? I, I think back to, do you ever, do you read XKCD, XKCD comics? No, no, I wasn't into comics. Yeah, it's a super nerdy computer comic, but he talks about everything, Randall Munroe, the author.

And he has this one comic about steroids. And it's kind of like explaining the idea of the problem with steroids to somebody who's not from earth. And it's kind of like, you know, like people do this thing where they have competitions to see who's the strongest or the fastest. But then some people take things that makes them too strong or too fast. And that's a problem. And when he describes

it that way, it's kind of like, it is very silly that you can, you can work out and you can do all of these things in the competition, but you can't do these things. And we've created the structure of competition and then we've created our own rules and then you break it when you go outside of it. And so maybe it's, maybe it's what we're doing. That's the problem is that I wanted to a certain extent, like, is it just what we're making sports mean? But this is what happens when I ramble about a topic I really haven't thought through completely. I love, I love thinking out loud through stuff. I mean, and I think different person, that's how I am. I'll start thinking out loud through a topic, but certain personalities think, so wait, you believe that? Like, no, I'm like literally wrestling with it out loud so I can

assess the validity of this argument, that argument. And I might change my mind tomorrow just because I'm in the process of learning something. I'm not, you know, there's other topics that I've done all the research. So no, here's, I can tell you exactly what I believe, you know, I'm 85% confident in this belief. Here's the reasons why I believe it. Here's responses to all the counter arguments. But with most topics, I have not done that level of research. So I, I enjoy thinking out loud through things, you know? Um, and I guess that's where my head's at currently is like, if we have female and male sports, because if men and women ran together, then men would get all the awards and not women, but black men get all the awards,

not white men. And we don't, that's not a problem for us. So why do we have that distinction? If men are biologically stronger and bigger, why do we, why do we separate? Why do we intersect that in the way that we do? And I'm not saying we shouldn't, but it's peculiar to me in a certain sense that we do make that one matter. I would say the one thing is, it does seem, I mean, biological sex does cut across all the way through all ethnic differences. And I don't know. I don't know enough to say it, but I think people might challenge the science behind the physiology of certain ethnicities. I don't know. I don't know.

I've never done any research on that, so I don't want to speak out of turn. Me neither. Yeah. Now we're just both talking about things we don't know. Let's bring up something else. Let's talk about climate change or something. Okay.

You mentioned early on in passing the Blanchard, Lawrence, Bailey kind of trio. And anybody that's done research in this area knows those names very well. Probably 90% of people listening have never heard of any of those names. But there, you know, Ray Blanchard was famous for coming up with the theory of autogynephilia. Bailey kind of ran with that. Ann Lawrence, who is a trans, I think she would identify as transsexual, not transgender, I think. A trans woman, I guess, has also done research on that. So I guess I'll let you define what autogynephilia is and what are your thoughts about that?

Again, one of the many controversial topics that are in this conversation. I don't hear a lot of people talking about it as much anymore, though. It's out there. It's out there. And unfortunately, it's often weaponized, right? Like, I guess I'll define it first. So autogynephilia was a term coined by Ray Blanchard. Of course, it's a Latin term.

Auto means towards oneself. Gyne is women. And philia is fetish or desire. is oneself, gein is women, and philia is fetish or desire. So this term is referring to the love of oneself as a woman, or in other words, those who might transition because of an arousal or a fetish towards the thought of being a woman or being female, rather, not rather than, but that being the kind of root piece of it. So this is something that he came up with, and he came up with a typology as part of it that separated trans women into two categories, known as homosexual or heterosexual. And this is referring to their birth sex. So homosexual trans women would be those who are attracted to men, and heterosexual would be the ones who are

attracted to women. And he kind of, he viewed these very two disparate typologies like that. And the ones who are attracted to men are more like women. And the ones who are attracted to women are autogynephilic. So they, they position themselves what they do because they're sexually aroused by the thought or the presentation of being female. That is one of the best clearest minute and a half summaries of it I've ever heard, I think. So anyway, go. I spent a shocking amount of time working through this stuff.

Thank you. But yeah, and so understandably, there was a lot of pushback from the trans community because no one likes to be told that their deeply held identity is a sexual fetish. And it certainly doesn't help them to achieve rights and freedoms and the stuff that they're looking to have, but it also exists. And I say that because I know it exists because I also know those people, meet a lot of trans people.

And I work with a lot of trans people now. And sometimes someone will come and say something. There's one particular individual who I was meeting with for a while, a few years ago, and they kind of described to me that they, they really want, you know, as they said, titties, you know, that, that, that's, that's hot. And then it's kind of like, Whoa, like you think that's what transition's about, but there are, there are people who are in that space. So I do think that there's merit to that research where I struggled with

Blanchard's work was that this was an all or nothing. It was either you're out of kind of feel like, or you are attracted solely to men and And it's not just attracted. You meet all these things that's very like you are these things, therefore you're that. And that's the part that I don't fully buy because for myself, I didn't feel that. And I still don't feel that. But as always with the butts, when you really read Blanchard's work, what I described up front was kind of what we often hear, but when you really read it, love of oneself as female doesn't have to necessarily mean purely sexually.

It can also mean psychosocially. And so in that sense, I do feel like this fits everything more. And I also happen to be somebody who is very, I'm not very sexual. I called myself asexual for a long time because I just didn't care about sex. I'll tell you a funny story. So I didn't have sex until after marriage. And for my wife to be, this was a religious thing. Apparently this is very much, you know, we don't do this. And so we weren't going to, for me, it was kind of a religious thing, but it was mostly, I just didn't care about sex. As I mentioned earlier, I had never looked at porn,

had no real interest and didn't really realize I had no interest, but I was very preoccupied with my gender and all of that. And I just had no curiosity about it whatsoever. And so we had never had sex, even though we lived together before we got married. And so we're laying in bed maybe a month before our wedding. And I was thinking, oh gosh, we're going to have sex soon. Like, what if we have a baby? We were both still in school. And I thought we can't have a baby. So I said to her, like, what if we keep not having sex after we get married? Like, what if we just pull off for a few months or years or something? And she was not happy with that suggestion. And that was when I realized that she'd been looking forward to this for years. She had been really excited and anticipating sex. and she was waiting till we got married to have sex. And I was sitting here thinking, I'm just, I just don't

care about it. Like it's, and then we got married and I've since had sex and it's fine. It feels good, but I could do without it. Like I just, that doesn't, it never mattered to me. And sexual attraction, same thing. It never mattered to me. I'm married to a woman now and I love her. I love her as a person though, but it's not, when people describe physical attraction to me, it's always felt very foreign because I think naked bodies are really gross. I've asked so many people that I'm like, do you actually like the look of like a penis or a vagina or any of this? Because I think, you know, people can look very aesthetic with clothing and all of that, but like naked people are gross. And some agree, some people like, no, absolutely not. But I, I don't get it.

So I have a really low sex drive. I would say, well, I definitely have a low sex drive. And so I wonder how much that plays into it too. Maybe there is some merit to, to Blanchard's typology and I'm in that category, but it does manifest itself as a sexual fetish because nothing manifests itself as a sexual, like it's like it's it's a valid question yeah because of you according to if i remember bailey uh his book a man who would be queen which has gotten more he kind of popularized because blanchards was just kind of

stuck in the halls of academia yeah he didn't do a book yeah yeah yeah but that book was whatever you think about i thought it was a really well-written book, engaging. And again, this is something that's distant from me, so I want to be really cautious in even having any kind of opinion about it. I've talked about it briefly in some talks and stuff. And in almost every case, I get a guy that comes up quietly and says, That autogynem, whatever you described, can you tell me more about that? And what I have is a very masculine man who's a probably married maybe has a few kids as you know the furthest thing you would think from being trans but he would say i have these desires i didn't know how to put a name on i had

a good friend of mine that actually came out to be and that's not the right term coming out but i mean he described me he's like yeah that autogynophilia thing like i wrest wrestled that for years like one of my friends he for whatever reason he he's he's wrestled with kind of spikes of anxiety and the only thing that can relieve his anxiety is putting on female like kind of lingerie ish kind of clothing and that just immediately takes away his anxiety so it's it's kind of in the ballpark of autogynephilia, but not fully. It's just kind of a zero-desire transition or anything. It's not even this. He said as much as it's female kind of lingerie, it's not... I can't put my finger on it, but it's not just sexual.

It's more like a comfort. I don't know. He couldn't even really describe it. But all that to say, from my vantage point, I think you're totally spot on. 100%, there are people who experience this. I know. I mean, if you say it doesn't exist, and my friends don't exist, they've told me this autogynephilia thing is what I experienced. But I don't like the airtight categories. In my experience, I've just seen such a range of, even within a broad umbrella of autogynephilia, a range of experiences. And then some biological males who might check off some of these boxes who, you know, don't really kind of like you, I guess.

Like you would, I mean, the fact that you're in kind of like computer software programming and, you know, you're married to a woman, like you're some boxes and autogynephilia you check off. But when you describe it, it's like, yeah, I don't really fit the way the way you know blanchard and others describe it but so yeah i i don't know those are my thoughts on it i don't i think there is a utility in nakes people would say well who cares it's like well i i think it is helpful for again people that have this experience and and when they find that there is a thing that it is a name that there is research done on i think that can be really liberating and helpful for people because otherwise they're just left thinking like, what, I'm just some fringe human that has an experience that nobody else has.

So anyway. And then you end up in that, I'm different. And the shame starts to form. But I fully agree with everything you said there, that it does exist. I don't think that the rigid categories that we're holding are useful, but where it's gone a lot recently

is it's being used as a weapon. And so- How so? I agree. Yeah, so it's very easy to take that narrative and say sexual fetish, pedophile, groomer, you know, just kind of tie them all together because they hit our disgust foundation, right? That the, oh, that's taboo, that's not the normal,

these are deviants and then go down that path. So as we have a certain crowd who's looking to push back against gender ideology, which I support the pushback in some of the ideology, but as they look to do that by going after trans people themselves, it's a very easy target to say, look at these people, look at that man you described who's your friend who, you know, deals with some things this way. Well, he's probably a groomer he's probably after your kids blah blah blah and and the dialogue can go that way and you know twitter and a lot of those places that's where it ends up so the discussions if you search autogynephilia that's mostly what you find it's not thoughtful interesting conversations about what's going on

for humans you just find equating it with with bad sexual sexual behavior. Yeah. Well, okay. I want to say something that's going to be, please correct me. Okay. If I, this is just my thoughts. When I look at like, especially the current conversation, like drag Queens from a, even without knowing the people I'm thinking on social media, whatever, like when I look at the presentation, it just screams autogynephilia. have you seen my drag queen videos? no, no I have two, a sequence of two videos about drag queen

it just seems so sexual I mean obviously the definition is a biological male performing as a woman at least and maybe it's hyped over media or whatever but like in almost every case it does seem highly sexualized and very different from all the

trans people i know where they struggle with severe gender dysphoria it wasn't a sexual thing at all you know um but the jack queen thing i don't know yeah what are your i i don't take a lot of strong stances on many many of these issues i try to be moderate i try to be thoughtful but but the drag discussion is one i've come out with stronger words to words especially for children of course we have we have drag queen story time is a huge thing up here in ontario every library has it even in our conservative towns they have it and i i have really come out in opposition to that because i don't think that helps anybody i don't think that helps the argument that they often use is we're doing this for diversity to expose children to, but like, okay, well then expose them to me, like have me come and just be me. And they'd be like, yeah, this is Julia. You know, Julia, Julia is male, but that wasn't working. So Julia dresses, like we could have that conversation, but instead we, as you said, take the worst pernicious, digressive stereotypes of femininity, display that. How how how does that help anybody and so i

i don't think that's helpful i think it hurts trans people because that that i get equated with that after rupaul's drag race came out i get equated so much with people going oh yeah i get what you're saying because i watch and i'm like what like like that there it's just it's it's insulting it's unhelpful whether it relates to autogynephilia i don't know um i i have no idea on that but i do think that it's unhelpful and frustrating when it gets equated no i i from my vantage point it seems like it gives trans people a bad name and it feeds into kind of the kind of right wing truly transphobic maybe assumption that all trans people are like you know what you see in in drag

shows and stuff and it's like no that's just not so when when people are kind of on the other side making it you know kind of front like um fronting you know drag shows and so on like i think that's actually unhelpful but it'd be like saying you get christianity because you've watched sister act and it's like okay like you know that you might pick up a few tidbits of christianity from that but tidbits is probably even a far stretch at that point that's so funny julia i don't know how long it's been i think we're coming up on two two hours maybe uh we're getting close to it so uh i'm gonna let you go this i could talk to you for hours thank you so much for the honest and raw and real and authentic conversation this This has been so enjoyable. I've learned a ton and really appreciate your voice and your honesty.

Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it as well. And I will do this again sometime if you're interested. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.