SIO285: Debunking "The End of Gender" Part 2

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is Thomas, that's Dr. Lindsey Osterman, back at it. This is part two of debunking the transphobic slice of crap that is Dr. Deborah So's book called, so we're debunk a debunk, I guess, because her book is called The "End of Gender," debunking the myths about sex and identity in our society, and this is a debunks of that debunk. It's an inappropriate she inappropriately debunked bad debunk, so

0:00:50 Lindsey: I guess so, this, yeah, so maybe the first episode can be called the beginning of the end, of the End of Gender, and this one can be the end of the, end of, the End Of Gender, that'd be good, mm-hmm,

0:01:04 Thomas: We're bunking it Yeah, uh, yeah, we are, I guess we're re-bunking these myths then, is that, yeah, I don't know words, anyway, make sure you caught part one if you didn't already. Uh, so I think just, just in case we want to re-up our content warning that we are debunking a very transphobic book. And so discussions of, of things that are, are transphobic, that and, ideas and that are not valid and probably very insulting. So content warning there. We are debunking this book. We're discussing the book. It's a transphobic book. I am so excited to hear Lindsay break this down. It is so educational. I'm learning stuff. I didn't even know how much difference there was between this picture of scientific sex and

0:01:19 Lindsey: Rebunking them, it Yeah.

0:01:58 Thomas: What actually is out there in the world. That's so fascinating, much more fascinating than Debra So makes it out to be or other transphobes make it out to be. So let's go. Part two.

0:02:01 Lindsey: It's True, part two, yeah, yeah, so in the in the last one we talked about her first two chapters, uh, which she says were aimed at debunking two myths, right? So the myth, the first myth was that biological sex was a spectrum, the second myth was the gender is a social construct, and so now we're picking up with myth three, that there are more than two genders. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So in this chapter, she is tackling what she calls a myth to do with the plurality of gender identities that have been articulated over the past few years, because we've seen an explosion of language around this in recent years. People are describing the way that they experience their gender in different ways, and it's very interesting, right? So, so essentially the claims in this chapter are that gender diverse individuals are either, one, teenagers going through a phase, two, people who are confused about whether it is okay to be a woman with some masculine traits or whether that means they're a different gender altogether, or, this one's fun, they're dudes trying to pick up girls.

0:02:50 Thomas: Hmm.

0:03:15 Lindsey: So this is a quote. She says, quote, in my opinion, for straight men, identifying as queer can be a tool signaling their progressivism so that feminist women will date them. So that's cool. Not dismissive at all. So yeah, that's the crux of her claim here. So, and you know, I just have to say again, given her focus on the biological basis of gender and her acknowledgement of the variability in the processes underlying sexual differentiation, her dismissiveness of variability and gender identity seems very, very odd.

0:03:14 Thomas: Oh, wow. Yeah, that is weird. That is because you mentioned that last episode that she did actually run through some of the science accurately on on kind of the variability there. So I guess, like, Occam's razor thing might think, like, OK, well, if we have that variability in the science of the genetics and all that stuff, maybe that would lead to some variability in how gender would be expressed in humans, wouldn't you think?

0:03:55 Lindsey: She does?

0:04:14 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it would be pretty surprising if it didn't.

0:04:18 Thomas: It would be very surprising if it didn't.

0:04:21 Lindsey: Yeah, and so, but actually, she's playing another very weird language game here, right? Here's a quote. Here's a Quote. She says, quote, everyone to some extent is a combination of male and female traits. No one is 100% male or 100% female or 100%, gender-conforming, right? So, so far, it's like, okay, well, that's literally what everybody's talking about, right, when they say that gender's not binary, when they say there are more than two genders, when they say it's better represented as a spectrum, that is what they are talking about.

0:04:52 Thomas: Yeah, sure.

0:04:52 Lindsey: And so, I'm like, where are you going with this? And then she, and huh, then she ruins it by illustrating her point by talking about how there are some men who like talking on the phone and some women who like playing Video games.

0:04:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:05:04 Thomas: Talking on the phone. That was what she went with in the year 20, I guess, late 2020 or something or when this was put out. Yeah.

0:05:06 Lindsey: Yes. Yep. Yeah. So to be completely fair to Debra So, what she does acknowledge is that there's variability in masculine and feminine traits. She just resists the idea that this legitimizes the claim of people who say that they have gender identities other than man or woman. So she says that there are there are men and women full stop and men and women can be more or less stereotypical and like yes that's true but there are also people who don't identify as men or women and it's unclear to be you

0:05:39 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, yeah. I know this it's how would you prove this? You know, I want to do the big Lebowski like, well, that's just like your opinion, man. Like, okay, if you say no, no, it's actually just variability and kind kind of some of these traits that are typically gender coded and not a different gender identity, I'd be like, well, who am I going to ask to, if, if I, uh, you know, have a trans friend in my life, which I do have many, am I gonna trust Debra So's opinion of their identity or should I just maybe ask them what their identity is?

0:06:19 Lindsey: Know I think the latter might be a good strategy. I know I'm to get cancelled for saying that it's

0:06:22 Thomas: Yeah. It's how, right. You just, again, you're back in SJW prison, you're, you've just been sacked. Yeah, I don't get where, how could she even prove that? Like, what would even prove that?

0:06:35 Lindsey: Well, I'll tell you I'll I'll you how she supports it. It's bad. Um, yeah, it's just, it's, it's very strange to me that this would be the point that she's doubling down on. Like, you know, so in the same discussion, too, she, she claims that left wing activists are actually the ones that are being really rigid in their definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman, because they're insisting that everyone who doesn't perfectly 100 percent fit the gender stereotypes of these categories must require a completely new gender. Describe them. Right. Which is, is it true? Right. Right.

0:06:37 Thomas: Okay, yeah. I Want to know how she would respond if I was like, you know what, Deborah So, I think there are only men, there's only one gender, and they're just people who have like more and less of the one gender's traits, you know and like some people have a little little bit less of it, some people, but there's only one, sorry you, you aren't a woman, that doesn't exist, how would, what would, how would she respond? Well, no, yeah, you get the two, you get the two genders

0:07:19 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, you got the two. Because it's well, because it's you know, I do think she would say that it's because it'S related to sex. But then it breaks down once you talk about the variability in sex, right? Like, it's just it's, I don't know, like, I can't claim that all of her argument is like, completely coherent to me. And I did.

0:07:32 Thomas: Right Well I think because she's smuggling in some assumptions that are again culturally conservative assumptions about gender, and that's the places where it seems to me the, the places where she has to do this, like kind of just insistence, like, no, it's actually not that you're transgender, you just, you know, have a little bit of more of these traits that, whatever. The only way she could support that is by insisting upon it. There's no proof of that, that you could really have. I mean, it does, it's essentially just saying you must identify how I want you to identify, not how you want to identify. I don't

0:07:53 Lindsey: Mm hmm. Yeah, pretty much.

0:08:24 Thomas: Know what else it comes down to.

0:08:25 Lindsey: Right. Right. I mean, I think that there's also an implication here that, I don't know, that like identity isn't real or something, you know, because I mean – I don't know. Like she's fully willing to admit that, again, that there are differences in how stereotypically feminine or masculine men and women are, right? But then for some reason, she's just not willing to extend that claim to gender identity itself, right, So which is a I don't I it's very strange to me. Oh, and one way that she makes this point, this is fun, is that so Debra So describes herself as a highly masculine woman to credential making the claims that she is. So she says that, you know, even though she she she appears very highly feminine, that she is highly masculine. And then she's like, but I understand that I'm still a woman. And thus, yeah, Good for you. All right. Okay, so she always, she also criticizes the idea that gender is a spectrum, right? And says that it's absurdly inconsistent with the scientific consensus to say that there are an equal number of people at each point along that spectrum.

0:08:33 Thomas: Hmm.

0:08:54 Thomas: Yeah, that's interesting.

0:09:09 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Good for you.

0:09:36 Thomas: What?

0:09:36 Lindsey: And she, yes, I know, and she's right, that would be absurd, and nobody is saying that, right? I think that a good analogy here is to consider personality traits, right, so like like extroversion, for instance. Extroversion is a continuous bipolar trait, and there are people who are extremely low on the trait. We call them introverts, and they're people who are very high on the trade. We called them extroverts. And when you look at large samples of individuals, their scores on extroversion form a normal distribution. So so most people fall in the middle, right? They're not particularly introverted or extroverted. They're ambiverted. And fewer and fewer people um are there as you get further extreme in the scores, right, and I'd argue that you can probably talk about these gender identities in the same way, right, like if you're, if you're thinking about highly masculine gender identity, highly feminine gender identity, right, there are probably distributions here of like where people are, um, in terms of their identification with these, with these genders, right, and they're, they're distributed right, there's a a, yeah, yeah.

0:09:48 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:10:33 Thomas: Well, and it's, and it's like, she's coming in, like you just use the word ambivert, you know, and she, it's like, she's coming in and say, no, stop it. Lindsay. That's not, there's only two verts. There's only two verts because of God, but bile, not God science. There is only introverted and extroverted and you might be an extrovert with some introverted qualities or an introvert with some extroverted qualities, but you just invented that ambivert, Lindsay, and that you can't do that because I said so. Yeah.

0:10:45 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, mm-hmm. Close-minded. Close minded.

0:11:02 Thomas: Like what? My question would be why? Maybe, and if somebody, and along those lines, if I met someone who was like, yeah, I think I'm an introverted, but sometimes I just feel a little like, you know, I feel a Little extrovert. I wouldn't be like, no, you have to identify as an ambiverte or vice versa. If someone's like, Yeah, I'm ambiverted. I can kind of, you Know, I feel kind of either either way. It depends on my mood, blah, blah. You know, I'm not going to sit there and say, no, no, pick one. You need to pick one of the verts. There's only two.

0:11:21 Lindsey: Mm-hmm, yeah it's don't know this this stuff gives me a headache. So yeah, so so anyway, right, so like I just want to underline like what's the actual claim, because she's not representing in her book. There's there, yeah, the claim is that, you know, people have traits, right, which are definitely related to their biological makeup, and then form their gender identity. There are lots of people who are XX and are women, but not all of them. There are lots of people who are XY and are men, but not all of them. That's it, right. And she's misrepresenting the conversation around these issues in some really important ways, right? So one, obviously, she's strawmanning not just scientists, but also activists, right. But two, she is drawing inappropriate conclusions from the scientific literature to invalidate gender diverse identities. And because people with with, you know, know, gender diverse identities have been historically mistreated and oppressed for not fitting into these categories, we absolutely should be making a push for education on these issues and acceptance and validation of people's identities as legitimate, which is exactly what she is working against in writing a book like this. It's

0:11:30 Thomas: Yeah.

0:12:28 Lindsey: Very harmful.

0:12:27 Thomas: I'm not a fan.

0:12:28 Lindsey: I'm not a fan either, just for a minute, I think it's worth talking about, you know, How does she sort of justify her claims about this, right, right? So chapter four, this is the myth number number four that she says she's debunking is that sexual orientation and gender identity are unrelated. And as with so many of these chapter titles, my first reaction to reading this was like, what, what is she actually claiming here? Because if she means unrelated as in different, then yes, right? Sexual orientation, gender identity, are not the same thing. Um, but it's bad word. Yeah. Yeah, oh man, just wait for it. Wait, wait.

0:13:00 Thomas: Wait, sexual orientation. Wait. Hold on. Hold on.

0:13:05 Lindsey: Wait.

0:13:05 Thomas: I think maybe I didn't hear this right. What is the thing she is saying is a myth again. One more time for me.

0:13:07 Lindsey: She says it's a myth that sexual orientation and gender identity are unrelated. So she's essentially saying they're related.

0:13:17 Thomas: Yeah, like related how, like, they correlate in certain ways? Yeah, like, okay, it tends to be the case that, you know, if people who identify as male are usually hetero by statistics, but like they're related, but that doesn't mean that anything other than that doesn't exist, right?

0:13:18 Lindsey: Uh-huh. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, they correlate. That just, yep.

0:13:37 Lindsey: So that was exactly my reaction, right? So I was like, I was like, okay, so either she's saying they are different, sure, or she could be saying that they're uncorrelated, right? And that's what you're saying right now.

0:13:38 Thomas: Yeah, which not even people on our side would make that claim, right? I mean, like, nobody thinks nobody thinks that, like, no, it's if I find, find out that you are a woman, my SJW card tells me it's 50-50 chance whether you're into men or women. Is that what she thinks that we think or something?

0:13:51 Lindsey: Nobody, nobody.

0:14:07 Lindsey: I don't, just wait for it. Cause there's some, there's Some real fun stuff.

0:14:09 Thomas: I can't, I don't know. What is the thing you think that I think, Debra? So what is it?

0:14:14 Lindsey: I, yes. Right. I had the exact same reaction. Um, So yeah. So like, if that's What she means, it's like, it's, it's, it's another straw man. Right? Um, so, but after, after a long preamble about how much she loves partying with gay men. She begins her argument with this statement. She says, quote, let's start with the, quote, sexual orientation is biological part. Some of you may already be mad, wondering what proof does she have that sexual orientation is biological?

0:14:16 Thomas: All right. Yeah.

0:14:39 Thomas: This writing is so fucking bad. Oh my God. This is not good writing. Yeah, I know. Let's do two separate things, I realize.

0:14:43 Lindsey: And it's another straw man. But yeah, I know it's not even worth saying this, but I'm going to. It's a straw man, literally any textbook in psychology or biology that addresses sexual orientation will have a thorough review of the current state of the evidence that factors in prenatal development and other things appear to be related to sexual orientation. Nobody who is educated on this topic would claim that sexual orientation is not influenced by biology or that it is chosen, okay, but as it turns out, where she's actually going in this chapter is much more disturbing than just trying to make the left look dumb again, right. In this chapter, she's going to make a case that the vast majority of people who identify as transgender are actually not, right, so we previewed this at the beginning, but rather are either A, gay and confused about their sexual orientation, right? Or like they're confusing their sexual orientations for their gender identity. B, have a paraphilia known as autogynephilia, which describes being sexually aroused by the thought of being another gender.

0:15:20 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:47 Lindsey: C, suffering from a mental illness that secondarily causes gender dysphoria and can can be resolved by treating the underlying mental illness rather than through gender affirmative therapy. I know you may be thinking, how is she getting from sexual orientation and gender identity are different to this, but Yeah, okay, yeah, So the first two claims about the sexual orientation confusion, and the autogynephilia, are based on the work of Rae Blanchard, whose claims have, from what I have read, not stood up to empirical scrutiny. But, it will not surprise you to know, she represents his claims as though they are a matter of settled scientific consensus that are now being blackballed by left-wing activists. To the best of my knowledge, this could not be further from the case. There is simply no evidence supporting his model. And to the third claim about gender dysphoria just being a secondary result of some other mental illness. This is a fun one too, right? So she makes this claim on the basis of literature showing that transgender individuals are at higher risk for suffering from mental health issues, right.

0:16:03 Thomas: Just waiting. Citation needed. I mean,

0:16:55 Lindsey: Any guesses as to what kinds of mental health issue might be more prevalent among transgender folks historically? Historically. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:17:09 Lindsey: No, precisely right. So, so yes, all of those things, right, they are at higher risk for anxiety, depression, suicidality, and the and the usual interpretation for this finding is not that the mental health issues are causing the gender dysphoria, which is what she asserts, but rather that gender dysphoria and the social issues that you just mentioned that surrounds being gender diverse are likely to cause things like anxiety, depression, suicidality?

0:17:30 Thomas: Ask any, well, I'm sure I know we have a lot of cis people listening just statistically, but also statistically a lot of people like myself who struggled with depression. At no point in being depressed was I like, maybe I'm not a dude. That's not, that doesn't cause the, that it would be the other way around. You would think pure, like I'm saying purely because I was depressed at no point was I, like, now I am also gender dysphoric. Like that doesn't strike me as plausible.

0:17:53 Lindsey: Yes, you would. And that, again, that is the consensus.

0:18:04 Lindsey: No, right? And she, again—like, she doesn't even acknowledge this other possible interpretation, which is the mainstream interpretation of that relationship. She just claims directly that the gender dysphoria is caused by some other mental illness, right? So she's just making a claim that if you're transgender, it's because you're mentally ill in some way, It's really good.

0:18:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:23 Thomas: So citation needed essentially more.

0:18:25 Lindsey: Yeah. And again, right. So she she makes sure to say throughout this chapter, you know, to give herself something to point to when people accuse her of being transphobic. She makes sure to say throughout this chapter that she's not saying there are no truly transgender people. But for somebody, yes,

0:18:25 Thomas: Yeah.

0:18:42 Thomas: It's It's Weird. I was wondering about that because the stuff you've it does seem like, okay, so this Quillette article that was the excerpt of her book, it does the thing that a lot of these people do all the time. They did it with me too, and they do every issue. "I want to protect the real people who have the such and such thing," like, not that, because of the title was "How the Non-Binary Trend Hurts Those with Real Gender Dysphoria." So some but somewhere in her writing it seems like she's allowing for, like, her what she thinks is genuinely trans people. But the more I hear about this, the more that seems to be defined down into oblivion, like I'm not sure who the perfect trans trans person is for her liking. Yeah.

0:19:03 Lindsey: Pretty much. Yeah, it must be a vanishingly small number, right? Because she's, again, she's – yeah, I've got a quote in a second that kind of speaks to the fact that, like, her assumption when somebody self-identifies as transgender is that they're probably not. That's her assumption. Yeah. So for a person who is not saying that there are no transgender people, she spends an awful lot of time in this book undermining the sense that we should believe transgender individuals when they relate that aspect of their identity.

0:19:36 Thomas: Well,

0:20:00 Lindsey: So, yeah.

0:20:01 Thomas: Plus, if we're allowing yeah, yeah, I'm actually I'm really unsure, like, what if I think it's probably just a trick. I mean, it was a trick the whole time. Well, if you back in Me Too, I'm worried that these things that I don't like are gonna devalue the claims of the people that I blah, blah, blah. It's just pretending like you're actually advocating for something you're not. But Anyway, let's say, let's take her at her word, because she has said explicitly, it seems as though, like, like you're saying, that she does believe trans people exist in some form in her mind. So what is the thing? But she's also suggesting that actually, I guess most, like, I'm actually trying not to strawman here, like, I guess she's suggesting most people who think they're trans are actually either like, I guess, gay or or something. Like That's what she's saying. Like, they, they or, yeah.

0:20:20 Lindsey: Yeah. Yes. Gay

0:20:53 Thomas: Like Interest.

0:20:54 Lindsey: Have a sexual, you know, thing or are mentally ill.

0:20:58 Thomas: What I want to ask Deborah so, is okay, if you've granted that there are the people somewhere, the magical people somewhere who are really trans, trademark, like TM, actual trans somewhere, what, what in your mind, Deborah, so transphobe, what in your mind separates those people from these other people you're talking about? Like, what would be the thing? How would you know? What would be that difference? And I would suggest that that would be a very difficult question for her to answer, I think. I don't know what she would even say.

0:21:29 Lindsey: Well, she talks a lot in the book about persistence.

0:21:34 Thomas: Persistence.

0:21:34 Lindsey: Yeah, like whether the gender dysphoria persists for a long time, right? But there's been a lot of writing, like, boy, boy did I do a lot reading to sort of contextualize some of the stuff that she's talking about. And that approach to trying to conceptualize individuals, right, has been has been pretty strongly criticized because right, because she's getting in the next chapter. She's going to get to claims about, like, who should be allowed to transition. And she essentially claims that, like – because it's so hard to predict who's going to persist, right, in their gender dysphoria, that it's very dangerous to allow people to transition, right? During adolescence. And so she's – she's putting a lot on that idea of the persistence of gender identity.

0:21:40 Thomas: Hmm. Yikes. Hmm.

0:22:23 Thomas: Okay, so in her mind, it would like, the real trans people would be people who still have dysphoria after you do a bunch of stuff or something. Like, after you you you deal with it the way she wants to, okay. Maybe

0:22:33 Lindsey: Yeah. Exactly, right. So, Like if you can't convince them that they're actually cis, um, and you and you try really hard at the conversion therapy thing that she, that she advocates for, and they, they still don't improve, then, like, as a last resort, you can, maybe, Yeah, maybe you,

0:22:49 Thomas: You accept them, acceptance. As, A last resort, that's a good summary of this, uh, book. Hmm.

0:22:52 Lindsey: Exactly. That's That sounds, that, yeah, I don't, I don't think I'm strawmanning by saying that, like, she, yeah. Um. All right, so there's an anecdote here that I think is relevant to her position here. And I'd like to read Debra So in her own words because I think it's illustrative. So she's relating this anecdote about she's at a conference and this man comes up to talk to her about his child who is a trans girl. And it's clear that his daughter has expressed that she is a girl consistently since he was a very young child. And now apparently she's interested in transitioning. And the father is experiencing like a lot of turmoil over whether or not he should support his daughter in wanting to transition. And so here's what she relays saying to the man. She says, quote, I explained what my conclusions were based on. I explained what my what my conclusion was based on summarizing a few research studies and explaining how politicized the subject had become. In my mind, it was very likely that he did not have a transgender daughter. He had a gay son.

0:23:03 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Geez.

0:24:00 Lindsey: That's Debra So. And now, yeah, just a little bit, right? I want to talk about some of the ways that she invokes neuroscience to cast doubt on gender diversity, right, and on, you know, transgender people, So right. I alluded to earlier the fact that there's good evidence that certain regions of the brain are sexually differentiated during prenatal development, and later too, but a lot of it is during prenal development. And there's also quite a bit of evidence suggesting that some subset of these differentiated structures, but not all of them, show differences as a function of sexual orientation. So these structures look similar between straight men and lesbians, and they look similar between straight women and gay men, right?

And so there's some interesting literature on this, right. So she claims that to date, the research on the brains of transgender individuals is confounded with sexual orientation, which she defines according to sex assigned at birth. So she would say that a trans woman who is attracted to men is gay, Thus, that that any brain similarities that have been identified between cis and transgender individuals could be just because of sexual orientation in the way that she's defined it. And so she uses this assumption to dismiss neuroimaging studies that have indicated that, like, in some regions of the brain that are sexually differentiated, that you actually see more similarity between trans and cis people who share a gender identity than you you do between

0:24:01 Thomas: Mm-hm. Okay. Huh.

0:25:34 Lindsey: Transgender people and other people who have the same sex assigned at birth, essentially, right? So I actually, so she says, she's referring to like a couple of specific studies. And she says these studies have them completely confounded. And so we can't know whether the brains of transgender people are actually confirming that their identity is what they say it is, is essentially her point. But I actually found a 2017 study. And I don't want to of claim that this is all like totally settled science. I think that there are a lot of these questions where, you know, we're still figuring out like what the underpinnings are. That's

0:25:34 Thomas: Mm-him Yeah. Well, It's

0:26:05 Lindsey: Fine.

0:26:06 Thomas: Like sounds like it's relatively new and also a complicated area to study. You know,

0:26:10 Lindsey: It's very complicated. Yeah. Right. But I just, you know, she wrote this in 2020. She has cited some things from 2018 and 2019. I just find it interesting that she didn't talk about this study that examined a number of sexually differentiated brain regions. And they did so as a function of both gender identity and sexual orientation. So those things were not confounded in their study. And they found some stuff that looks pretty interesting to me, so, like, there's, there was like one brain region in particular which has been implicated in identity and like bodily awareness and stuff, and it showed, uh, similarities on the basis of gender identity but not sexual orientation or sex.

0:26:11 Thomas: Yeah, wow. Wow.

0:26:45 Lindsey: Right. I know, it is interesting, isn't it?

0:26:46 Thomas: That's so interesting. You know, because this is something I was going to talk about. I have found it very fascinating throughout my life because, you know, it is absolutely the stereotype. But because I do theater, I have a tremendous number of gay friends, of trans friends, and all kinds of different people. I've always wondered, like, I wonder what the difference is, because, you know, I know some gay men who are stereotypically feminine, but but are not trans. Men.

And They're I've Always just kind of wondered, like, I wonder what the differences there, is it, you know, what's, what's going on, and and what I have not wondered is, hey, why don't you identify how I want you to identify, what I've wondered is, like, oh, I just wonder what's going on there, like, what, what, where are the lines, if there are any, you know, between being maybe someone who feels very feminine or rejects gender norms altogether versus someone who's like, no, I, this gender I, whatever, you know, like, what are the differences there, and this is fascinating because it sounds like maybe there are brain level, level differences that would be like, no, it's not just that someone, for example, is very feminine, it's like, no, there, there could be regions in the brain associated with identity that would account, or at least kind of correlate with the idea that it's like, no, they, they, this person is a woman, and this person isn't, that, that is just endlessly fascinating to

0:27:13 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:28:05 Lindsey: It's almost like you should believe people when they, you know, say, tell you what their gender is, pretty cool. Yeah.

0:28:10 Thomas: Me. Yeah. Maybe it's super complicated. And you know, it is a real good shortcut if you don't, If you don't want to fully figure out every unanswered question in science, it's just be like, hey, what are your pronouns? And then when they say what their pronouns are, you'd like cool, those are your pronouns.

0:28:23 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. That would work.

0:28:27 Thomas: Yeah, that seems like a good shorthand,

0:28:27 Lindsey: That's a, that's pretty, pretty good, pretty good heuristic there. Yeah, but again, like she's just, she's trying to, she trying to make the case that like, well, I already showed you that gender is, you know, directly related to these biological factors. And now I'm showing you that there's no evidence that there is a biological underpinning when it comes to transgender people and thus, right. Yeah and And also, like, you know, the neuroimaging studies is not all the stuff we can look at, right? Like, there's there have been twin studies, right, that there's a higher concordance of, know, being transgender among identical twins compared to fraternal twins, so it's thought that there's potentially a pretty strong heritability here. So, like – yes, the point this is, this literature is far more complicated than she suggests here, and she is selectively focusing on some pieces of it in a way that seem to support her general claim, and she's ignoring everything else. It's not, um, not that surprising. Okay, right.

So, myth five, um, she, the, the fifth myth, fifth myth, oh, it's hard to say, uh, that she is debunking is that children with gender dysphoria should transition. So, so, so we'd been wondering this whole book, where on earth is Deborah So going with all of this? Um, in this chapter, she, um, or she uses these claims that we've talked about, about transgender identities having no biological basis, etc., etc.,

0:28:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:29:42 Lindsey: To, um, support, um, support the point of, like, undermining gender, gender affirmative therapy, which she grossly mischaracterizes as pushing transitioning on people who might not benefit from it. And, moreover, she implies strongly that hormone therapy and surgical interventions are being pushed on prepubescent children, which is not true. And by implies strongly, I mean that she often references the fact that children are being encouraged to transition at earlier and earlier ages. But, like, that term transition is pretty ambiguous, right? So she has some plausible deniability in terms of whether or not she's distorting anything when she says this, right? You could be talking about encouraging social transition, right, like changing clothing, name, pronouns, etc. But she is clearly in this chapter trying to instill fear and outrage at the idea of young children being allowed to choose irreversible medical interventions at very young ages. This is clearly her point.

0:30:39 Thomas: And this is a really tough topic, right? Because I think, you, the other side of that is it's irreversible, like, both ways, sometimes, or at least difficult to reverse both ways. So, like, but what about people who are trans who then, like, it's harder to transition after puberty and all that? Now they're, what, they're screwed because Deborah So didn't think they should be transitioning in the first place? Yeah.

0:30:57 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a very, it's very tough topic, right? And, you know, as always, like, I think that we should look to the medical and scientific consensus on these issues to figure out what the best course of action is right now, right? So I want to define, I want us to read a little passage from this, like, very accessible article that I found that discusses gender affirmative therapy and what it is. And actually, I didn't seek it out for this reason, but they were actually responding to an editorial that Deborah Soe wrote about this topic. But so here's the – it just so happened to be.

0:31:15 Thomas: Then That was just so happened you weren't Oh, that's

0:31:41 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:31:41 Thomas: Funny.

0:31:42 Lindsey: Yeah. So, quote, the goal of gender-affirmative therapy is not transition, contrary to what proponents of rapid-onset gender dysphoria claim. And I'll come back to that. The goal is to listen to the child and decipher, with the help of parents or caregivers, what the child is communicating, both about gender identity and gender expression. Instead of encouraging the child not to be transgender and risking pushing them back into the closet, therapists seek to support the child and their parents through the process of exploring gender. They remain neutral with regards to whether the child should be trans or not. Okay. And this explanation of gender affirmative therapy is consistent with what I read in, like, academic review articles that were summarizing the current research on this and the best practices and standards of care when it comes to youth with gender dysphoria.

0:32:31 Lindsey: Okay. So claims that, again, she's not a fan of gender-affirmative therapy, and she claims that a different therapeutic approach is more acceptable and supported by evidence. And she describes it here. So, quote, the quote-unquote therapeutic approach, or the quote-unquote developmental model, allows a child to explore their gender while being open to the possibility that they may grow comfortable in their birth sex. A clinician will seek to understand factors relevant to the child's development, including trauma or other psychopathology, and what else is going on in the child's life that may be leading them to feel this way. This final approach, which is backed by the scientific literature as the most appropriate course of therapy for these children, has instead been denounced by experts, medical organizers, and academic researchers as transphobic, conversion therapy, and abusive. You know who I believe? The experts, medial organizers, academic researchers.

0:33:26 Thomas: Yeah.

0:33:27 Lindsey: Because, I mean, it doesn't take much reading between the lines here to understand what the goal of the approach that she's describing is, right? It's assuming that children who express transgender identity are probably not, in fact, transgender, and the goal of this therapy is indeed to discover the quote-unquote real cause of their expressions of gender dysphoria. And so this reference to trauma, psychopathology, perhaps sexual orientation, whatever, the idea that these are common causes of gender dystphoria are scientifically discredited claims. So yeah, what she's describing is conversion therapy, and it's been rightfully denounced as such. I

0:33:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:34:02 Thomas: Conversion therapy, but trying to, like, PR it up to sound better than it is. Because, like, she tries to make the way she makes it sound, I, sounds like probably what the, the other thing is, like, yeah, obviously the other therapy, the correct standard of care, you know, like as best determined by professionals right now is going to involve the possibility that the person is CIS. Like that's they're not going to like say, nope, first order of business is you're not CIS like that's not that's Not how things work, is it?

0:34:15 Lindsey: Had the same thought. Yeah.

0:34:26 Lindsey: Uh-huh. No. Exactly, it, no, it's, again, it's another straw man. This Book is, is so many straw man people. I, it's, yeah, so, um, so yeah, so what she's describing is conversion therapy, and and I'm not, I'm just asserting that, so that you know, one of the the peer-reviewed papers that I, that I read on the current best practices for care of transgender youth, they said, quote, "the official position of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association are that this approach," and the referencing the approach that she's talking about to the care of transgender youth is unethical and harmful.

0:34:39 Thomas: Yeah. Mm hmm. Wow. OK, let's not do that then.

0:35:08 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, let's not. Let's not do that. So she claims, so claims that gender affirmative therapy is being embraced too hastily by the scientific and medical communities without sufficient empirical evidence to support the idea that transgender identities should be affirmed or that the medical interventions to support transitioning are safe, okay? Now, from everything that I have read, the current standard of care is evidence-based, and it is extraordinarily cautious and measured with regard to medical interventions, particularly those that have irreversible effects, right?

So, like, you know, it's true that hormone therapy in adolescents, it is very likely to cause irreversible infertility, nobody is taking those, those, you know, those costs lightly, right, and the the implementation of things like puberty blockers, right, is is specifically designed to introduce, like, a period where you can be more cautious, right? So, like, uh, we should probably summarize a little bit of that, right? So, um, in terms of medical transitions, right, from what I've read, it seems like, like, the standard of care is that the child has started going through puberty, right? They then introduce hormone blockers, or, excuse me, yeah, puberty blockers, right, at an early stage in puberty.

And this is essentially done just to buy the child and their parents a little more time to just make sure that they're really sure about all this before they go through with less reversible medical procedures, right. Right. It's, it's the standard. I mean, what it takes to go through a transition when, when you are a young person.

0:35:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:43 Lindsey: Right. And later on. I assume. Right. Right, but I focus mostly on youth because that's what she focused on. It is it is a very, very difficult, careful process. The standard of care is very high. And she's she's making the case in this chapter that like that, like, no, they're trying to they're trying to get, you know, young kids in there and just do all this stuff at once and not even ask them very many questions. She offers a number of anecdotes to support this, but not any actual evidence, which It's, it's really, it was very difficult reading this chapter, I've got to say, it's not supported.

0:37:16 Thomas: Know, yeah. Gosh, it's obviously a difficult topic. And there's a, once again, I don't mind continually bringing up the punching bag of Ben Shapiro because he has 9,100 million times the listeners and money that we have. Uh, but, uh, people like Ben Shapiro want to draw a comparison to like, you're going to let kids transition. My kid died, identified as a dinosaur yesterday. I'm da ba da ba dah.

0:37:42 Thomas: And like, use that to leverage that into a fear that like, oh, are people making irreversible medical decisions based on the whims of children? But It's just so different from that. That. Like as a parent, you know, the fucking difference between when your kid is playing an imaginary game and being a dinosaur or something versus what trans youth actually looks like. I got to say, I got bring this up. But, but my outlook on this really changed when I watched this episode of Vice News that I just tracked down here from 20, I think 2017. I've referenced it a little bit before, but if you just search for Vice News trans children, it'll probably come up somewhere.

But I will tell you, I watched this episode and I was sobbing because it was so, it was the most powerful thing that I've ever seen where this was about, you know, there are several stories about trans youth, but one of them was in Texas, a woman raising a child who is trans and just very simply did not identify as the gender they were assigned at birth, a very young kid, and watching this mom who, you know, was a conservative, probably, who knows if she still is or whatever, but did not accept it at first.

And she was the child was five, you know, but she didn't accept it, and she describes, again, it's been, it's what, four years since this came out, it stuck with me, you know, I, I'm a little rusty on all the details, but it really was an emotionally powerful thing.

It talked, she, she talked about like, I, every day, every day I would try to put my kid, uh, uh, I believe the child was assigned male, but, uh, identified as female from my memory here, and every single day she would try to put on, you know, make the

0:37:42 Lindsey: Oh, yeah. Yes.

0:39:36 Thomas: Child wear, you know, typically male clothing, and it was a battle that she could not win, the mother could not wind, she was like, I, I just, and so what happened was she eventually, this conservative mother started to like get, you know, into this and like research it and came to like kind of find out like, well, this is a real, I just have a trans kid. Like this is real thing. You know, somebody who was not accepting of it at first, you know, and then she went from not really accepting her child to accepting her and then trying to like talk to the people around her in this Texas community, to her family, to our church, trying to explain to them what this situation was and just getting nothing but hostility.

You know, like people thinking that like, this is just a phase. This is just the kid doing pretend. This is, and this mother being in tears of like, you have no idea like how hard I fought this and how and how ineffective that was in the face of what's obviously this child's gender identity. And I will tell you, that was the most emotionally powerful thing. I don't, you know, Vice News is an interesting organization, organization. You know, I don't, I, I don't like endorse like everything they do or whatever, but I, this episode I think was really good. Um, and, uh, I would check that out. If you're somebody who, you is, is not sure what to make of some of these issues, you know, this is not kids playing pretend and

0:40:16 Lindsey: Oh, wow. Yeah.

0:41:05 Lindsey: No.

0:41:06 Thomas: Then, then getting irreversible medical advice, you know?

0:41:08 Lindsey: No.

0:41:08 Thomas: Or whatever medical procedures.

0:41:09 Lindsey: No.

0:41:10 Thomas: Um. It's a very powerful thing.

0:41:10 Lindsey: No, and so it is. Yeah, no, you know, I'm so glad that you brought that up. And I'd like to put up against that the following quote from this book. Says, quote, If you've read anything about gender dysphoric kids, you've probably encountered the catchphrase consistent, persistent, and insistent. It suggests That children who are truly transgender and would benefit from transitioning have an unshakable or consistent, persistent, an insistent sense that they are the opposite sex. But really, aren't all kids consistent, persistent, and insistent when they want something badly? Kids say all kinds of things and yet adults don't take them seriously about any of it unless it relates to gender. I

0:41:20 Thomas: Mm. Mm-hmm. No.

0:41:44 Thomas: No. This This 30 year old Deborah, so, I is she a parent? I kind of doubt she

0:41:57 Lindsey: Have no idea of

0:41:57 Thomas: Is Because you, you fucking know the difference between what kids consistently, persistently say and what they don't. It's just It, it's night and day. Let me, let me read you, I know I found the, I think the article kind of blurbing that episode that I'm talking about. There's a paragraph here, or maybe I could read. Whenever Kai told her mom that she's a girl, Kimberly reprimanded her. This is in when she, you know, the mother wasn't accepting at first.

0:42:06 Lindsey: Course.

0:42:15 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:24 Thomas: Kimberly repramanded her. I would say, no, you're a boy, Kimberly said. You're a boy. Kai was constantly being punished. She spent entire days in and out of time out for crossing gender boundaries. The kid spent the majority of her days being punished there. There were, sorry, oh, sorry. There were days when I would have to tell her that, tell, there were days that when I Would have to Tell Myself that I could not spank her again that day. I would just, okay, anything with kids gets me so bad now. It's like so hard to deal with because, yeah, oh let me, sorry I'll try to salvage this recording here. Okay.

0:42:43 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:42:56 Lindsey: I get it, and This fucking lady, this this is. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

0:43:09 Thomas: There were days when I would have to tell myself that I could not spank her again that day. I would tell myself, you have to let this kid out of timeout. Whew. Sorry for getting emotional, but it's anything with, with kids, just anything with kids just really gets me because like, you, you know, the difference, you knows, as a parent, like you should know. And as much as I'm, you know, obviously really glad that this, this parent eventually figured things out. Like Like, it's hard to process the damage done there and to it's hard to deal with emotionally the idea of just how many trans kids, you know, throughout the world are not getting any understanding even even after a process of, of just awfulness here, you know, of this fight.

0:43:57 Thomas: And it's, it's, man. Anyway, apologies, but it is this, this book is, is so so ignorant and dangerous and uh Yeah, and and you know they're, they're real people's lives at stake, um, and I would again, I would encourage you to go go back and watch this, this episode of the Vice News, and just, if you really, if you're not getting it, if you don't see why that, you know, I'm having this reaction or why people might have this reaction, you might, if you just see what it looks looks like for a kid to be like, being punished for consistently and persistently, in the words that you used, identify, like, like expressing their gender as

0:44:06 Lindsey: It's garbage.

0:44:39 Lindsey: Right.

0:44:40 Thomas: They, as they see it. And it's undeniable.

0:44:43 Lindsey: Yeah and her her sort of, you know, this quote I've I find so problematic on so many levels. Right. Because what is this about? Kids say all kinds of things and yet adults don't take them seriously about any of it unless it relates to gender. Like what?

0:45:01 Thomas: Yeah. You know, if kids say I'm hungry, I take them pretty seriously about it. You know?

0:45:06 Lindsey: I actually I made the same comparison in my notes. Like, yeah, seems, like they take

0:45:09 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I do actually take them quite seriously. I'd encourage everybody to to take their kids appropriately seriously. Yeah. When they have something that seems like a pretty important need, take them seriously. If they say they have to go to the bathroom, if they say their hungry, if they're thirsty, they say that they're bored. Yeah, no, you do take them Seriously. Or if it's something like I want candy instead of dinner, then you're like, I don't take you seriously. There's an appropriate level of taking your kids seriously. And it's not all or nothing. It's not, oh, my kid's full of crap all the time.

0:45:14 Lindsey: Their kids seriously Yeah, yeah Yeah, no,

0:45:41 Thomas: No, like your kid will tell tell you stuff. And, you often it can be, you know, a little difficult depending on what the thing is to know, like, ah, do you really need to, are you messing with me right now? You know, kids are kids. But those words, can you repeat that phrase again? Because it's so useful. Was it persistent, consistent?

0:45:41 Lindsey: What Can, yeah. Consistent, persistent, and insistent.

0:46:03 Thomas: Yes. You just know as a parent, you really do. And maybe you'll F up and maybe Maybe you'll, you'll mistake something. I know those are some of my biggest regrets as a parent. And they're, they're honestly, they'RE very minor things in the grand scheme, but times where I've like, for a minute thought my kid was like, ah, they'Re just, you know, whatever they're they're being a kid. Cause they really do spout nonsense all day. That's the main function of a kid and I love it. It's my favorite thing. But the couple of times where like, oh shit, no, they actually needed something. And I just, in my mind, I put that down as like, they were messing around. Round, those are some of the, I have beaten myself up over that and I feel so bad about it and you really know, like consistent, persistent, insistent, you know the difference.

0:46:03 Lindsey: Right.

0:46:48 Lindsey: And, and her calling that a catchphrase too is a little dismissive. I mean, that's, that's actually part of the, you know? Yeah, exactly. I know, yeah. So I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna rip through a couple, a couple of other points. Uh, I don't, they don't, I've got, I've Got more here than I will probably say, but yeah, to undermine again that parents should be, well, making the claim that parents should be wary of gender affirmative, she says a number of other really terrible things. So she says that parents are being bullied into letting their children transition with the use of scaremongering and misuse of statistics regarding suicidality in gender diverse children, and she is lying.

0:46:51 Thomas: Oh God, fuck you, catchphrase.

0:47:03 Thomas: Sure, yeah, that's exactly the opposite of true. It sounds like people are being bullied into not accepting their trans kids here.

0:47:33 Lindsey: Yeah, it's, yeah, right. I just, yeah. I'm going to very quickly. So She says, quote, "Parents across the board are consequently being encouraged to monitor their kids for signs of gender atypical behavior. Those parenting gender dysphoric kids are also irresponsibly being told that 41% of transgender children have attempted suicide, even though children under the age of 18 were not part of the study," because she just was talking about a study of adults, "and that their child has a high likelihood of becoming part of this statistic." Now, again, she doesn't provide a citation here for people making this claim. So I had to go and try to find some stuff, right? And so I googled, and I found a popular press article reporting this statistic that 41% of transgender children have attempted suicide. And it cited a totally different study than the one that she was talking about with adults.

0:47:42 Thomas: Sure.

0:48:27 Lindsey: It was a 2018 study with 120,000 adolescents in it, many of which were gender diverse. And here are the stats. So 14% of the sample report, and this is kids 11 to 19, right? So 14%. Of the sample overall reported at least one suicide attempt. And this percentage was way higher in kids that were gendered averse. So for example, For trans boys, 50.8% had reported at least one suicide attempt. Trans girls, 29.9% had recorded at least once suicide attempt, non-binary youths, 41.8%. So she's, I won't say she's lying actually, she's wrong.

0:49:12 Lindsey: She's dangerously wrong. And this is all toward the point again that you shouldn't be seeking gender affirmative therapy. Therapy. She also makes a bunch of claims that regret after transitioning is way more common than it actually is. It's not very common. I mean, she cites one study, it's a 2018 study, 46 surgeons across two transgender health conferences that reported that of the approximately 22,725 transgender patients they had surgically treated, 62 of those patients were for transition regret. This translates, yes, it does, right?

0:49:47 Thomas: Wow, that sounds like overwhelming success and yeah, yeah

0:49:51 Lindsey: This translates to a detransition rate of about 0.3%. However, these numbers were collected in 2016 and 2017. We have yet to see the fallout from the spike in referral numbers resulting from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Okay, we don't have enough time to go into the rapid onset gender dysphoria. This was a purported phenomenon based on a very shoddy study. It has been thoroughly discredited.

0:50:14 Thomas: That sounds fake, right?

0:50:15 Lindsey: It not clear, right?

0:50:15 Thomas: Right? I Okay.

0:50:18 Lindsey: So this researcher did a study where she specifically sampled in a particular way that was likely to yield parent reports of the kind of phenomenon that she was looking for, and then she reported that this was like a super prevalent thing, right, and like the the gist of the claim is that adolescent girls are identifying as trans because they're they're looking for social acceptance in their peer groups, right? It's it is a thoroughly discredited study. Deborah so says that it's not, and that it's only being discrediting because of ideology, but no, no, it's just, I went back and looked at the study, I looked, I looked at their responses to it, it's it's thoroughly based on the methodology.

0:50:57 Thomas: I mean side note, so that ended up being 0.3% of people who transition like express regret or something about it. That's an astonishingly low rate. Like we're dealing with human beings, even Even that stuff. I would have expected a higher rate, you know, just because humans, you higher. That's astonishing.

0:51:00 Lindsey: Yeah. So that's, yes.

0:51:15 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:51:15 Thomas: Wow. It's even more sure than I thought. Cool. Okay.

0:51:16 Lindsey: I mean, I totally agree with all of that. I mean, I do want to underline, though, that this is like the percentage of people who sought surgery due to concerns about regret, right? It's not just like, you know, I mean if you measured this in a different way, like asking people if they had regrets, right, or pursuing other ways, then you might get a slightly higher number. But like even when you do those kinds of studies, the number of people, um, who experience regret over transitioning is very, very low, right. And she's trying to make it seem like that's not the case, but she's wrong.

0:51:26 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Oh, okay. Yeah. Imagine, look, what is a number that would tell you that we should change our minds here? Like for me, it would be like, I guess above 50%, you know, that would be the point where I'd be like, well, this sounds a little bit, it's coin flip. So maybe it's risky enough to, you know?

0:52:09 Thomas: But if it's, if it'S in the 1% or lower range, it'S, imagine having the point of view that therefore that other 99.7% shouldn't be able to get the care that they need because that 0.3%, maybe something happened or there was some, I don't know, something, something went wrong, you know, yeah, nothing

0:52:08 Lindsey: It's, yeah, no, it shouldn't get care. Yeah.

0:52:27 Lindsey: No, I had the exact same thought. Like, she's essentially using an impossible standard here to make this case. She's like, unless you can, yeah.

0:52:33 Thomas: In medicine is that certain, wow.

0:52:36 Lindsey: No, no. And do you know what is really, really clear? That gender affirmative therapy is highly effective, right? Right? And that there are excellent outcomes from transitioning, right? Like based on the current protocols.

0:52:50 Thomas: That's awesome, that's really good news. I'm glad that there's something positive in this episode. What?

0:52:50 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, it's great. Yeah. Okay, so like Myth 6 is just, this is the chapter where she's making points about how, you know, if we do gender neutral bathrooms, then people are going to, sexual predators are going to exploit women, trans women shouldn't be in women's sports or house and women's prisons. It's this kind of stuff. I don't want to spend time on this. It's horrifying. This doesn't really invoke any kind of science. There is one fun quote that you might enjoy. Quote, "lesbians by definition are not sexually attracted to people who have a penis. Penile vaginal intercourse is technically heterosexual sex, which conflicts with the definition of being lesbian. Attempts to coerce lesbian women into being sexually interested in penises have rightfully been compared to conversion therapy and corrective rape." So she's claiming I

0:53:42 Thomas: You're gonna have to translate this for me, is

0:53:45 Lindsey: I, yeah, she's blaming, I guess, that like the left-wing agenda is to call anybody bigoted for not wanting to have sex with someone and thus they're forcing people to have sex with people, I guess.

0:53:59 Thomas: That where she's going, so is she, yeah, this involves a lot of, this involves, involves a lot of figuring out what the hell she thinks that we think that they think, you know, like, so, in her mind, are people going to be made, like, forced to have sex with transgender people, is that part of the, the agenda here, because I because I actually think that, um, you know, consent is very important, and nobody should ever be forced to having sex with anybody, so that solves that, that particular issue, I think, pretty easily.

0:53:59 Lindsey: Yeah, I mean, it's an, I mean, she same I also think that, yes, Yes.

0:54:30 Thomas: Cool. Oh, I'm glad we solved it. Yeah.

0:54:31 Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. So we're done with that. Yeah, cool. Good for us. Yeah, anyway. So look, that's, that's actually the main stuff that I wanted to cover. Closing thoughts, right? The actual claims that she's making here, the ideological claims, dime a dozen. I don't think we'd be spending time on this if this was just like another Ben Shapiro, right? But as, as you said at the beginning, right, the, the thing that I find very disturbing and dangerous about this book is that she is uniquely well-positioned to use the science very effectively to propagate misinformation. And she's done it, right? She got signal boosted by Richard Dawkins.

0:54:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:55:06 Lindsey: And I found the experience of reading this book horrifying from start to finish. I've been angry for a week. And it's, yeah, it's disgusting. This is, as you said, having these ideas out in the world, what she is doing with this book is actively going to harm people. To the extent that parents believe this, policymakers believe this. This is actively perpetrating harm.

0:55:29 Thomas: Oh God. So infuriating. You said it. I'm not going to add anything to it. I just want to say thanks Lindsay for, for doing the work of reading through this piece of crap book. So no, uh, science doesn't actually back up any of what these cultural conservatives have to say. It never does. But thanks so much, Lindsay. Thanks for listening, everybody. Get the word out on this. If you see anybody using her as a reference, point them to Dr. Lindsay Osterman here, who is doing the hard work of showing why the science doesn't actually agree with what she's saying. So a big heartfelt thanks, Lindsay, and to the listeners and everybody, buddy, and wishing all my trans listeners, my listeners my listeners who identify as anything other than what these conservatives want you to identify with, we're wishing you all the health and happiness, and sorry that crap like this is out there doing active harm to you and your community. It's awful.

0:56:20 Lindsey: Yeah. Yep.

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