Welcome back to the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Jordan Boyd, a staff writer
here at the Federalist. Today, I'm happy to be joined by Miriam Grossman.
She's a board certified adult and child psychiatrist, medical doctor, and she's
here to discuss her new book, one of five that she's written. So
Miriam, welcome, Well, thanks for having me. Jordan. Let's start
by telling us a little bit about this book and the idea for it and
sort of the driving force behind why you wanted to publish this particular message.
Well, the name of my book is Lost in TransNation. A child psychis
guide out of the madness, and I felt after a few years of seeing
families with a child who was questioning whether they were male or female, and
also helping that child or young adult, I was I'm just very deeply concerned
about the belief system that is being the rhetoric about gender that is being presented
indoctrinated into our young people, because it's a belief system that is not based
in science, and it is not based in medicine, and is being present
to young people, well to all of us, but especially to young people
as if we're you know, it's scientifically proven facts that you can be something
other than what your body is, and that what you feel you are overrides
what your body says you are. Now, you can have that belief that
that's possible. But what I'm saying is number one, you're going to pay
a price for denying your biology, and sometimes a very high price. And
number two that this belief system, because it's not based in anything scientific,
should not be taught in schools. I mean a lot of people believe that
we have a soul. That's not a scientific belief. It can't be proven,
right, but nonetheless it's a belief that many people do. You have
that belief, but we're not teaching it as a fact, certainly not in
our public schools. But we are teaching in our public schools as a fact
that children may be born in the wrong body. And that is a very
destabilizing idea that has again no scientific basis to it. And I am arguing
that kids and families are paying a really high price for these beliefs. Absolutely,
And you know I couldn't help, but notice that your book leads with
I think I counted more than a dozen pages of dedication to various people and
groups and even some anonymous Internet accounts. Can you tell me a little bit
more about your decision to include that long list. Yeah. The book is
dedicated to parents who have children or young adults who are in distress over their
being male or female, and who have embarked on this journey of living life
as the opposite sex or as some other version of the sex that they are.
So the book is dedicated to five hundred parents from seventeen different countries.
And these are the parents, many of whom I spoke to by zoom or
on the phone, and they, many of them, were in their bathrooms
or their basements, and they they were speaking to me as if it was
some criminal act to seek my advice, which it certainly, most certainly is
not. But they felt that way, nonetheless, and so I dedicate the
book to them. They are the heroes. They are not the criminals.
And I say the criminals are the individuals, the sex educators, the American
Academy of Pediatrics, the guidance counselors in schools, the individuals in our government
who are all promoting this narrative that is completely unscientific and for which kids and
families are and will pay a de stating price. You touched on this a
little bit ago, but in the book you discussed this concept of settled science,
and we know there's no settled science that gender experiments such as chemical castration
and mutilation are good. But what kind of evidence based consensus is there that
blocking biology is damaging and irreversible? And is the medical community, you know,
the psychiatry community, are they just blissfully ignorant of this or is this
something they deliberately look past to kind of advance an agenda. Well, you
see, this is also another issue that parents are woefully unaware of. And
one of the reasons that I wrote the book was to bridge there's this chasm
between what parents know and what they need to know on this subject. And
when I say parents, I'm not only including those parents who are dealing with
this issue now in their home. I'm really addressing all parents, because no
family is immune. And this adam bomb of a child suddenly, you know,
turning to his parents and saying, I'm not your son, I'm your
daughter, and I need for you to call me this new name and new
pronouns and take me to a gender clinic so my puberty can be blocked.
This is like an Adam bomb falling, you know, into your home,
and parents need to be prepared for it. So I'm encouraging even parents,
well especially parents of small children, to inoculate their families against these beliefs.
The answer is that there is no medical consensus on this issue. What there
is is a debate, and it's a very heated debate, and it's a
debate that parents are not hearing about. They are being led to believe by
the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and other groups, and by
government authorities such as doctor Rachel Levine. They are being led to believe that
there's a medical consensus, meaning that there's been extensive research and debate and discussion
and back and forth and very very careful deliberation before guiding parents on this issue.
And that is simply not the case. There has been no careful deliberation,
at least not in this country. Other countries, yes, Sweden,
Norway, Finland, England have all very carefully examined the evidence, the scientific
evidence, the data that we have collected over the past decades on this issue,
and they have all unanimously agreed that we simply don't have evidence that there's
long term benefit of medicalizing these kids, but we do have evidence of long
term harm. And that is why if you lived in London or Stockholm or
Oslo, and you have a child who is questioning and wanting to, you
know, asking about delaying their puberty using medication, it's going to be nearly
impossible to get that puberty blocker unless you you qualified to enter a you know,
a a a study that's be be done like in an academic medical center,
in which you will be screened very carefully and followed very carefully. And
that's going to be a small number of people that are accepted into a study
like that, a clinical trial. So in all those places you simply can't
get these puberty blockers, whereas here in the US, puberty blockers are given
out like candy, and they're given out sometimes the first, the very first
visit that a family may make to a gender clinic or second visit. And
how do we know that? How do I know that? Well, as
I write in my book, there there's an incredibly brave, courageous whistleblower by
the name of Jamie Reid, and she used to work in the gender clinic
and at Saint Louis Children's Hospital. She worked there for four years, and
she was on the front lines and she saw what was happening there, and
it upset her so much that she ended up she became a whistleblower. She
went to the Attorney General's office in Missouri and gave testimony as to what was
actually going on in that clinic. And it's it's just astonishing, Jordan.
I mean, it's just hard to believe that doctors would be, you know,
just knee jerk reaction to these kids who are mentally ill, kids who
have all sorts of issues, emotional issues, coming in and demanding that their
puberties be stopped. And instead of exploring their mental health issues and giving them
the help that they need, they put them on the assembly line toward these
medical interventions. And the quote that was so disturbing that Jamie Reid provided and
that I use in my book. In fact, I dedicate two chapters in
the book to Jamie Reid's testimony. But she quoted one of the doctors that
she used to work with because she left that gender clinic she couldn't stomach what
was going on. One of the doctors described the work that they were doing
there as we are flying the plane while we are building it. We are
flying the plane while we are building it. In other words, we don't
know what we're doing here. We're we're treating these kids, and we're kind
of finding out if this is a good idea through treating them. I mean,
it's it's terribly disturbing. And you know, I used that quote in
fact, when I was at the House of Representatives in Washington in June this
past June, and I testified on this issue of gender affirming care. We
cannot be building the plane while we are flying it. I mean, are
you kidding me? If we are providing interventions to children that end, you
know that that basically are going to cause lifelong disfigurement and possibly sterilization. We
better have really good, not gold level evidence, but platinum level evidence before
we even think about doing anything like that. And what I explain in the
book is that the evidence isn't there. The US is really an outlier.
The US and Canada are really outliers when it comes to these treatments. And
a few weeks ago, there was an astonishing letter published in the Wall Street
Journal that was signed by twenty one different experts in gender adolescent medicine and from
nine different countries, And that letter to the Wall Street Journal basically said it
was directed toward the president of the Endocrine Society endochronologists, of course, being
the doctors who prescribed hormones blockers and cross sex hormones. And this letter essentially
said, what are you doing. There's no evidence for this, What are
you doing to your kids? This is really remarkable stuff that's going on in
the field of medicine, but parents aren't going to hear about it. The
watched Auto on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day, Chris helps
unpack the connection between politics and the economy and how it affects your wallet.
Commercial real estate is in a Category five hurricane with the Fed continuing to unsuccessfully
raise interest rates to curb inflation. Real estate loans in two years are going
to top two trillion dollars. Could over five hundred banks go bankrupt. Whether
it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Be informed. Check out the watched Auto on Wall Street podcast with Chris Markowski
on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, and I mean,
you're right, it's horrific, it's dangerous, it's insane. And one
of the things that you mentioned in the book, you kind of kick off
your introduction with this profound confession that after forty years, I've realized my most
challenging fight is not against dangerous diseases, but dangerous ideas. And in your
experience, how has the dangerous idea of radical gender ideology evolved from theory to
practice, Like, how did we go from cross dressing to mutilating children in
the span of just a few decades. I think so many people are taken
aback by how quickly this seemed to come upon the normal public and how did
that happen? Well, it does seem like it happened, you know,
at tremendous speed. And certainly the epidemic that we're in the middle of now,
the tsunami of kids of five thousand percent increase in the number of kids
that are presenting with this issue, that is very recent, you know,
that's maybe since twenty fifteen, twenty thirteen, So that has happened recently and
quickly. But the ideas have been around for a long time. The idea
of having an identity, like a ecological identity that's separate from your physical body.
That idea has been around for a long time. Gender theory has been,
uh, you know, popular in in the universities, gender studies and
other radical you know, radical social movements, let's put it that way.
So I discovered when I wrote my book. I wrote a book in two
thousand and nine called You're Teaching My Child What? And that was a book
about sex education and how and what we're doing to our kids in our comprehensive
so called comprehensive sexuality education programs, exposing them to graphic, really pornographic material
and not providing them with the biological facts that they need in order to stay
healthy and in order to make smart choices. So I discovered when I was
reading and researching sex education that look, I just stumbled across the stuff about
gender now a right mind. This was in the late two thousands and so
I found all these different like Planned Parenthood and an organization called Sekis. Most
people haven't heard of it, but it's a very prominent federally funded group that
provides curricula sex education, curricula that as part of their sex education, they
were doing the gender education as well, and they were telling kids that sex
is assigned at birth. That phrase that drives me crazy, because sex is
established at conception, not assigned at birth. But they were, you know,
they were introducing to kids this belief system that male and female is only
one of many choices, and to separate humanity into male and female only is
false and is oppressive and is wrong, and it had that system has to
be taken down. So it was couched in these political sort of revolution you
know, Marxist kind of revolutionary terms. We have to fight this. This
is oppressive. Now. You know, biology tells us that, you know,
all all mammals, and we are mammals are sexually dimorphic, so we
come as either males or females. And it's not a oppressive binary. It
is just simply the truth. That is what male and female means. So
when I discovered that these things were being taught to to students, and often
pretty young students, I was terribly alarmed, and so I included a chapter
in that book, You're teaching my Child What It's coming out in paperback for
the first time. Next month, I included a chapter called gender Land,
and I predicted that this gender, these ideas about gender being fluid, and
you know that you could be many different genders and that it was your choice
which gender you're going to be, that that was destabilizing to kids, and
it was dangerous to kids, and that it was going to end in catastrophe.
And Jordan, it gives me no pleasure to say that I was right
and it has ended in catastrophe. So most people really only discovered this belief
system very recently, but it has been around in sex education and in the
universities for a long time. It's so crazy, and you know it's it's
not even in schools. I mean, one part of your book, actually,
before you even get into really the nitty gritty, you have a whole
section devoted to language and how you changed or even perspective on calling, you
know, a man a she or a woman a he. Can you walk
us through that evolution on your stance and talk about maybe there's people out there
who work at jobs who are required to use pronouns in the workplace and use
inaccurate language. How can they strike a balance between what is thrown in their
face as compassion and what is biologically true and necessary for society to move forward
and function. Yes. Yes, the answer is yes. There is help
and there are resources, and I have a lot of them listed in the
book and on my website Miriam Grossman MD dot com. There are parents support
groups. We didn't we didn't have this a few years ago, but we
do now, thank god, we do have a network of parents support groups.
There are organizations that are dedicated to supporting the parents and helping them find
therapists that will not you know that don't buy into the narrative, and therapists
who understand that when a child makes this declaration, what they are saying is
that I want to be I want to be a different person. I don't
want to be myself, and the therapist job is to figure out why there's
a reason for that. A person just doesn't randomly come up with this idea.
A girl doesn't just randomly say I'm a boy or I want to be
a boy. My life will be better as a boy, I'll feel more
comfortable as a boy. I just know inside of me that I really am
a boy. These are things that have to be explored closely and over time.
It takes time. You have to get to know the patient. It's
just like any other kind of therapy. It takes time. You explore,
you know, you learn all about the patient's life, their family, their
friends, what's going on at school, how do they feel about themselves,
what have they been through in their lives, what trauma have they've been through,
what are their dreams, their concerns, And then slowly, and I
describe this in the book. I describe a few patients that I've had that
have gone through the process of therapy, and they have come to they have
returned to accepting who they are, their biology, and they've turned away from
a path that would lead them to medicalization, and they are at peace with
their bodies, and they are grateful for having avoided and their parents, of
course, are extremely grateful to have avoided those interventions. So I would tell
parents that there are many resources, and I would tell them also that they
should start early when their kids are still small, and educate the child and
tell them things like, you know, you were a boy or a girl
from the moment that you existed, from the moment that you were created.
You have always been a boy or a girl, and you will you will
always be either a boy or a girl. Now That doesn't mean that there's
only one type or one way of being a boy and a girl. There's
so many different ways. And you want, you know, you want your
son to know that there are boys who who are not into sports, and
they're not into you know, building things and what have you. All these
stereotypical you know, rough and tumble play and all those ridiculous stereotypes that we
have. There are boys that are interested in in what might be considered more
feminine things. And it doesn't mean that they're not boys. That's just a
ludicrous idea. There are different types of boys, and different types of men,
different types of girls and women. We are all a mosaic of male
and female, but we do not want to harm our bodies in any way.
We want to find ways that we are comfortable expressing that mosaic of male
and female without hurting our bodies. So I want kids to be hearing that.
I want them to know, especially that sex is not assigned by some
random person who happens to be in the delivering room when you're born. I
want the child to understand that that is not true. So when they do
then hear it from other people or other sources a red flag. You know
they think about it and they can say to themselves, no, no,
no, no, that's not right. I know that's not right. I
know that male and female is determined at the moment of conception. So you
have to reach your child first. I promise you. There are many people
out there that are that want to reach your child before you do and influence
your child, and even I would say, recruit your child into their belief
system. So you need to be on top of it. You need to
certainly be on top of their Internet use. And I have an entire appendix
in the book written by an expert on parental controls of Internet of the Internet.
I can't emphasize enough how important that is. I also have two appendices
written by lawyers who are experts and parent rights. Parents have the constantutional right
to be to be in charge of their child's education, upbringing, and medical
care, and schools are infringing on that right. I have a chapter on
schools. I want parents to know no matter what age their child may be.
I don't care if if the child is a month old. I want
you to know what's going on in schools, and I want you to know
how to be proactive with that school so that if one day your child happens
to announce at school to the guidance counselor that she's not sure if she's male
or female, that school is going to have the heads up in writing that
in no way will you go along with them permitting her to change her name,
change her pronouns, or use the bathroom of the opposite sex. This
is what is going on at schools behind parents backs, and you know it's
it's not even in schools. I mean one part of your book, actually,
before you even get into really the nitty gritty, you have a whole
section devoted to language and how you changed or even perspective on calling you know,
a man a she or a woman a he. Can you walk us
through that evolution on your stance and talk about maybe there's people out there who
work at jobs who are required to use pronouns in the workplace and use an
accurate language. How can they strike a balance between what is thrown in their
face as compassion and what is biologically true and necessary for society to move forward
and function. Well, you know, I can, certainly I can talk
about what I did, but I cannot advise people who in the workplace,
you know, they may lose their job, they may be shunned, and
deal with all sorts of issues. Everyone has to decide on their own how
they're going to deal with that. What I talk about in the book is
the decision that I made regarding the use of the pronouns for transgender identifying people
that I was going to be discussing in the book, and I had to
decide at the beginning if I was going to use that new vocabulary that included
words like non binary and cis gender, whether I was going to use pronouns,
you know, preferred pronouns for individuals. And what I thought about early
on was a few things. One is that, first of all, this
new language that's being foisted on us, really many of the words have no
coherent definition. The word non binary, the words cis gender. I'm not
comfortable using those words because I really I don't know what's what's meant by those
words. They don't they don't make sense to me. I mean, I
know how they're defined. I know that non binary means neither male nor female,
but that doesn't really make sense to me. So I was also aware
of the fact that these new terms and new ideas erase an ancient word,
the word woman, and that if we're saying a man can be a woman,
which is what the new language obligates us to do, then the word
woman means nothing. So, you know, I thought hard about it.
Maybe I should just decide case by case and call a woman she if maybe
if, if, if this person had lived as a woman for decades or
made great efforts to appear female, or maybe I need to do that just
out of kindness and respect. And I explained how decades ago, if I
had had such a dilemma, I certainly would have called a man she because
I am respectful and I am compassionate, and it would have been a very
rare instance, you know, one in many tens of thousands. And why
not just be courteous and why not, you know, be empathic. It
would be an empathic kind of behavior. But you see, we're living in
different times right now, and we're living during a time when there's a crusade,
a turbocharged crusade. I would say that seeks to demolish male and female.
And part of that crusade, the success of that crusade, I should
say hinges on controlling our language. And so if I, under those circumstances,
the way things are right now, to call a man, she is
giving in to that, to that crusade, and in a way joining that
crusade, and I'm not going to do that. I emphasis size in the
book that male and female are permanent, and I urge parents to be honest
with their kids and consistent with their kids, and to stay grounded in reality,
biological reality. And I've always done that and I'm not going to stop
right now. So anyway, long story short, Jordan, that was kind
of long. But I decided that, even though it's cumbersome, that I
would avoid pronouns for transgender identifying persons in the book, and that I would
reject the new vocabulary because I've seen the suffering which it leads to, and
I will simply I will have no part of it. Right. Well,
I think that's a great policy to have. That's one that we had,
the federalists have too. We prioritize truth and it's true to call a mini
man. So thank you, doctor Miriam Grossman for joining us today. Can
you tell everyone where we can find you and your book? Yes, yes,
my website is Miriam M I R I A M. Grossman g R
O S S M A n MD dot com. You'll find a lot of
good stuff there, a lot of material for parents to use and others.
Anyone who's interested in this topic. Videos, my testimony and Congress is up
there as well. And then I'm on Twitter Miriam Underscore Grossman. Great,
well, thank you again for joining me today. Your insight is so helpful
and I'm so excited to share this with our listeners. Well, thank you,
Jordan, thanks for having me on. You've been listening to another edition
of The Federalist Freedio Hour. I'm your void, the staff writer here at
the Federalist. Until next time you are as the freedom and anxious for the
frame, you will be home