Hi, everyone, this is your usual host of Federalist Radio Hour, Emily
Dushinsky, coming here today with some bittersweet news. It's sad, actually it's
mostly sad. It's also very exciting for me. But I'm going to be
moving on June fourth from The Federalist to Unheard. And you know, it's
a very difficult decision because I'm immensely grateful to my colleagues at the Federalist and
really to all of the Federalist Radio Hour listeners, thousands and thousands of loyal
listeners, which is completely surreal to me. So I just want to thank
everybody, first of all, for listening over all of these years. Whether
you started with Ben, whether you started with me and kept going, it
means the world to us. I want to thank Ben. I want to
thank Molly and Sean, Molly Hemingway, Sean Davis, and Ben Dominic.
I want to thank them for hiring me at the Federalist when I was,
you know, just twenty five, twenty six years old. I don't even
remember at this point. They really took a chance in all allowed me to
do something really cool here, and I'm so grateful to everyone before that opportunity
I'm so so sad about leaving, but I'm really really excited about Unheard.
I'll be on a podcast twice weekly there, so it's launching soon. You
can't get rid of me in your podcast diet if if you want to keep
listening to all of my great thoughts. I'll be over at Unheard full time
writing there. One of the big draws I'll get to write. One of
my favorite things to do is right frankly, and so as much as I
love doing podcasting, I was very excited for an opportunity that helps me do
both because there's so much synergy. You realize when you're doing podcasting. Oh,
I really want to write a piece on this, but between podcasts you
don't always get to do it. So that's one exciting thing. And you
know, just the opportunity to talk to a new audience. I always find
that to be very exciting. Unheard published an amazing article that you may have
read. I've talked about it on here several times over the course of the
last six months. By Ion Hersey Eli, citing Tom Holland's wonderful book Dominion.
Tom Holland was on the show not too long ago. It was last
year, David HARSONI and I interviewed him about why she became a Christian,
and you know, that's certainly one of the things that drew me over to
on hear. They're doing really fascinating work and I'm excited about that. I
am going to miss my colleagues, my family really at the Federalist immensely,
sort of as a whole in my heart. I'll miss you Federalist fans immensely
too, but you will still be able to get more of me. Before
I totally sign off here, I want to thank Jordan Boyd. Jordan Boyd
is our wonderful producer of the show. She's been an incredible partner for me.
She does tireless, sometimes thankless work behind the scenes, maybe even more
than I know behind the scenes, doing incredible job getting this show ready for
everyone. And the good news is that Jordan's not going anywhere, and this
podcast is going to take a really exciting new step. So if you're listening
to Federalist Radio Hour, it's in your rotation, do not touch that dial
is about to, I think, really really level up and you'll be hearing
more from my colleagues. You'll be hearing more about what they plan to do
with the show very soon. I'll say part of the reason I wanted to
come here and talk a little bit about this decision is that I've also pre
recorded many podcasts. That's one funny way that podcasting on a daily basis works
is that we've had you know, certain authors, I've already recorded shows with
them, and their books come out in mid June, so you'll hear me
doing interviews for the next couple of weeks probably. I also just am someone
who likes to pre record podcasts again, mostly with authors, people who are
promoting new books new podcasts of their own, and I always felt more comfortable
keeping a couple of them in the bank, you know, usually just about
a week before they go up. I try to have a couple extra on
file, so you'll be hearing again a couple more of those, usually recorded
with some of a week before they come out, two weeks before they come
out, so you'll still be hearing me for about a week. If you
want to hear more of me, you'll find me over at unheard and of
course breaking points. It's just been the honor of my professional career to have
the microphone here and to join you all every single day. I can't thank
you enough. I can't thank the Federalist enough. I'm really, really grateful
and I always will be. Thanks so much for listening to Federalist Radio Hour.
We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Shinsky,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on exit FDR LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium version of our website, The Federalist dot Com as well. I
couldn't possibly be more excited or really more proud to host our guests today on
Federalist Radio Hour. That would be the one and only Mary Margaret Olahan,
who I'm so excited again, is out with her new book, her first
book. It's called dtrans True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. Mary
Margaret, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me and
for such a nice introduction. Oh my gosh, it could have been much
nicer. In fact, I'll continue to shower you with praise. I think
the idea for the book was super smart and Mary Margaret. As I'm reading
on the Amazon page right now, it has a little banner that says number
one bestseller in LGBTQ plus Demographic Studies. Thank you, congratulations, just in
time for bride month. And you know, we're laughing now because it's very
amusing that a book as subversive as this is the top seller on Amazon in
the LGBTQ plus Demographic Studies section of books. Because obviously Amazon, Ryan Anderson
had problems with Amazon. Abbil Schreier I think had problems with Target, maybe
with Amazon as well, but Amazon hasn't handled this topic in a way that's
been good for women, good for girls. But I just want to start
by asking you. You know, it's such an obvious question, but I
think the topic of this book is brilliant. It's simple, but it's brilliant.
So if you could talk to us a little bit about how you came
up with the idea for this book, that would be awesome. Yes,
of course, So I am a reporter and I spend a lot of my
time telling stories, and I try and be an unbiased reporter in my writing
and in my copy So you know, I have a lot of opinions.
But you wouldn't necessarily see those in my news stories. You might be able
to tell by the headlines I choose, or the photos, or you know,
the topics, but generally speaking, my copy is straight. I'm telling
you what's going on and the facts and including I like to think both sides
of the argument. So that's what I do on my day to day.
And when it came to this topic, I was reporting on transgender issues since
about twenty nineteen, and when I used to work for The Daily Caller,
one of my editors, who was amazing, Jeff Ingersoll, assigned me a
piece on gender affirming care. And it was a topic that we had heard
about, but we, you know, we didn't really know what it meant.
It was a very generalized euphemism. We were certain of that, but
it kind of sounded like the media was using it to describe maybe a social
affirmation, so parents or school teachers affirming kids by calling them different names or
different pronouns. That was kind of what we thought it was at the time.
And so Jeff has signed me this story on gender firming care, and
I did a deep dive on what it meant and what it entailed and who
was pushing it, And when I was digging into that story, I realized
that gender firming care is a euphemism pushed by activist out activist groups like the
ACLU, the HRC, and GLAD to hide the realities of transgender surgeries,
hormones, and puberty blockers, even for kids. And that story was definitely
very foundational for me because I realized and kind of had my eyes opened to
how aggressively the mainstream media was working with these out these organizations to subvert the
truth about this trans issue. And so obviously I had already been interested in
the topic, but that really piqued my interest that specific story, and I
started paying a lot more attention to what I was seeing. And around that
time, we were seeing more and more voices come forward speaking up against childhood
gender transitions or attempted transition, since we know that they can't actually fully transition
to another gender. And I was seeing people popping up here and there.
I saw one or two people putting their names out there. A lot of
people were talking about this anonymously because they received so much hate for it.
And there was one night where I tuned into a Twitter spaces event and it
was all these people speaking anonymously in large part about their hormonal transitions. And
so I was making myself dinner while I was listening to this Twitter spaces event,
and I ended up not really being able to eat because I was so
bothered. It was all these individuals sharing how t stosterone or estrogen affected their
bodies and their mental state, and I was blown away. Emily, I
could not believe it. I felt like I was listening to some kind of
sci fi horror movie. These people are sharing how they lost sexual function,
how they're infertile, how the hormones affected their muscles, how it affected their
bone density, and then mentally, the rage that they experienced, you know,
the women on tistosterone unlike anything they had ever known before, the really
crazy increased sex drive that they had no idea what to do with, and
the men talking about their mental distress as well. Just was very upsetting.
And I got out of this Twitter space event and I thought, I need
to do something on this because no one is talking about it, and the
media is actively working to frame public opinion on this. But at the time,
I didn't totally know how to get into it, because I, you
know, a lot of these people were anonymous. I had a lot going
on with so I bided my time. I did some more individualized reporting on
different people like Helena Kirshner, and then when I got the opportunity to write
a book, I instantly knew that this is what I wanted to cover,
because I thought, what better way to deep dive on the stories of de
transitioners and to help people understand the realities of what is going on here than
to just offer them bare bones the stories of people who tried to do this
and deeply regret it. And these are stories that are being repressed, they're
not being told, and you can't really properly explain it in a short news
hit. So that was my goal here, to just put it all on
paper and let people experience and empathize with the d transitioners. And here they
are very vulnerable and intimate stories in the format that allows them to be properly
told. Yeah, you know, and this is a demographic that has gotten
very little oxygen, let alone sympathy, despite the horrors of their story,
despite the fact that they are victims of a powerful system. In many cases,
people fail to understand how exactly powerful an industry this is, and We
can get into that a little bit, Mary Margaret, but I'm really glad
you started where you did because one of the things I was curious about all
of those symptoms of the treatments you just mentioned. I mean, some of
this was obvious in some brave voices people that you've covered for years, were
you know, crying out in the wilderness, saying, we don't know what's
going to happen. And by the way, these are possibilities, and of
course, sadly many of them came true. How did you go about verifying
getting in touch with getting the trust of people who have important stories to share
but are used to having them filtered through You know, The New York Times
has taken an interest in started telling these stories lately, which is, I
guess better than nothing. But if you're one of these detransitioners, I can't
imagine the bravery that it takes, the courage that it takes to allow that
story to be filtered through corporate media in twenty twenty four. So tell us
a little bit about how you went about I mean, even sorry to ramble
here, but even medical details that stuff just reported report that is hard to
verify, and you really had to do that. Yeah, and it's not
easy. I will say I've spent most of my writing career thus far trying
to convince people to talk to me, even though I am conservative media.
There's definitely a bias out there of you know, people are more likely to
talk to the New York Times than they might be to someone who works for
the Daily Caller or the Federalist or the Daily Signal because there's a distrust of
conservative media. But what's interesting is that when it comes to de transitioners and
a lot of people who've been affected by the gender ideology movement, they're finding
that conservative media is their greatest ally. And in my case, when I
would reach out to people, and I found most of the D transitioners I
spoke with on Twitter or x, which has been a really fruitful platform for
them because they are not censored, they can talk about their stories, they
can share and go viral. And I found a number of them on there.
Some of them connected me with each other, and I would just reach
out to them and say, look, I'm starting to write a book on
D transitioners. I want to include your story. I would be very transparent.
I'd say my name is Mary, markint Olhan, I work for The
Daily Signal, and I would be reaching out from Twitter so you could look
at my profile or you could click on my outlet. It was very you
know, I want to be very upfront about everything. And then when we
got on the phone, I would say, this is the project, this
is what I want you to be a part of. Do you want to
do this, and be very clear so that no one felt like, you
know, this wasn't a very straightforward ask. And then as I do with
all my reporting, you know, we would record the conversation and I would
make sure that I was representing what they had told me accurately, and I
would go over my notes, and I reach out to everyone who has mentioned
in our interviews, and I check all of the facts that we go over.
I cannot tell you how much time I spent reaching out to the individual
therapists and doctors and schools and organizations and verifying where these people said they are
from and all different parts of their stories. And some of it is easier.
It can occasionally be easier if there's a lawsuit already. That was not
the case with any of these individuals except Chloe Cole, and that really does
help because if there's a legal filing, you know that their lawyers already went
through a lot of this and verified it. But again, you still have
to do your fact checking and your homework and reaching out. And since I
wrote this book, a couple of the detransitioners have since filed lawsuits, which
I kind of wish they did it before. Was saved me a lot of
work. But I'm very happy for them that they can that they've filed these
lawsuits and are finally going to get some justice, hopefully. But it's helpful
from the perspective of a journalist. If it's already like an an affidavit,
it really is, you know, save your stress. That speaks to the
quality of the reporting here that you actually really had to get these details yourself.
Yeah. Yeah, And I think that also not having that lawsuit in
front of you does require you to ask a lot of different details that you
might not have thought of. And I really wanted this book to be something
that allowed people a glimpse that they hadn't been seen before. So I didn't
want to just give the basic structure of what these people had been through.
I wanted to know what were their last thoughts before they went under for their
double mis eectomy. Did they talk to anyone right before? What was the
drive over? Like, what did they talk to their parents about? I
wanted to get into all of that. And there's a lot of different intimate
moments that I shared that some people might think are a little too much information
TMI, but I think that they are really relevant and a lot of it
made me really emotional to hear about and to talk to you know, pretty
sia Able Luca, Helena Chloe about and they would get emotional sharing it with
me. And I like to think of myself as kind of tough when it
comes to telling these stories. I do a lot of culture war stories and
they can be pretty emotional. You kind of have to turn that part of
you off just for the workday. But this was This was very emotional,
and I included some details that I might not have otherwise, such as a
police report about a young girl's suicide, because I think that it moved me
very deeply, and I think it'll move other people very deeply to understand the
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or wherever you get your podcasts. Really, one of the biggest questions
right now about the de transitioner phenomenon is how big it is. And Mary
Margot, I don't expect you to have a perfect answer to that question,
and I'm sure it's one of the most common questions that you have gotten so
far and that you'll continue to get. And you know, I've had these
conversations with people before and some people on the other side of the argument,
and I consistently maintain that I don't think we're actually gonna know how big this
phenomenon ends up being until I mean that we could be talking in more than
a decade to fully understand the scope of what happened. Now, that's debatable,
of course, But can you just tell us how big, what we
know about how many people are affected, at least right now, and maybe
projections about what this could look like down the road. Yeah. I think
you're absolutely right in that the figures on D transition are a incomplete and b
manipulated. What you'll see from establishment media when they talk about this, and
they have, like New York Times Washington Posts, they both recently done some
decent reporting on D transitioners. I was surprised and happy to see that.
But what they'll say in those stories is that the D transition rate or what
they call regret rate for transitions is one percent. Well, that's not true,
and that is based on flawed studies that are and this is something we
see all the time, flowed studies and flood polling that is misleading and questioning
and doesn't include the proper groups. Researcher Releasa Littman has done some really great
work on this. I think it partially inspired Abigail Schreyer's book Irreversible Damage.
Litman found that only twenty four percent of the people who de transitioned actually went
back to their doctors and told them that they had detransitioned. So that's only
twenty four percent of a big group of people who told their doctors I regretted
this and I'm no longer living as a transgender person. And if you think
about that, that's and Litman argues this, but that's the equivalent of going
back to someone who abused you and saying, I wish you didn't abuse me,
and I'm not going to put up with it anymore. It's a very
unlikely thing for people to go back to their doctors and report detransition because those
are the same people that transitioned you. Those are the same people that told
you you're going to be happier if you undergo this gender transition or if you
undergo this double misactomy. And so Latman argues that she believes there is a
much higher number of detransitioners than we currently know of, And I would argue
the same thing as well, that there's also a big portion of people out
there that don't want to put their faces and names in front of the public
eye and share their stories. And I don't judge them for that at all.
I think many of them have been through a very traumatic experience and the
public eye is not for everyone. And if I were one of these individuals
who had gone through something like this, I would want to resume a normal
life and not really talk about it anymore. So, you know, I
respect the heck out of Chloe and Luca and Abel and Prisha and Helena for
sharing their stories because it's no easy thing, and I think that they are
aware that voices like theirs are very needed, but it comes at a cost.
One of as I was sort of prepping for this interview, I was
writing questions down and one of the things I was most curious about is this
maybe the notion or let's just say what you found when it comes to patterns.
So there are different places where I expect that you found patterns. And
I don't mean that as a leading question, but you know, are there
patterns that stand out from all of the stories. I know they're very different,
but one of the things that you do hear when you talk to the
parents of kids who have been intersucked into this consistently they have similar stories.
Shriyers written about this, for sure, but I was curious about a couple
of different areas. I'll start with first, were there patterns, consistencies and
how some of these young girls ended up going to a transition in the first
place, And just will quickly preface that by saying, Mary Margaret, I'm
sort of a younger millennial. I think you're probably a younger millennial. You
might just be right on the border with gen Z. Right, I'm ninety
five, so I think I'm a millennial. Yeah, you're a younger millennial.
So this is something that you and I saw happening hitting our generation,
and then gen Z has dealt with it even more squarely. But you know,
certainly a lot of the young women you were talking to were of a
similar age. So with that, any consistencies that you noticed and how people
ended up falling into the gender identity rabbit hole. Yeah, I think the
biggest thing was social media. And I say that with the caveat that exactly
what I expected you to say, by the way here, Yeah, and
part of it. I actually focused on specific ages for this book because I
include Walt Hayer's story. Walt is a man who tried to become a woman,
and I believe he's in his eighties now, and his story is really
important, and he's done some really pivotal work helping people through do transition and
helping men understand why they feel that they're in the wrong body and what they
can do to come to terms with who they were created to be. And
well, yes, yes, yes, he's done some amazing work for the
Federalists. So I included Walt's story, but my book is primarily focused on
the stories of people who have been much more recently impacted by this because,
in my humble opinion, these current de transitioners have been impacted in a dramatically
different way than people who have tried to transition in the past. Social media
has completely changed the landscape, and phones really have changed the landscape in that
it allows a young girl, Let's say she's fourteen, she's not doing well
in school, she's on the autism spectrum. She's having a hard time meeting
people, she's having a hard time interacting. Her parents may not have a
great relationship. She is lonely and looking for companionship. She can go up
to her room and shut the door and be on her phone and connect with
anyone that she wants and view any kind of content that she wants. And
I'm using a hypothetical girl right now, but I will tell you that multiple
people in the book told me, multiple girls, that they were really disturbed
by the representations of femininity that they were seeing on social media. And I'll
come back to that in a second, because I think that's really important.
But for Helena, for example, Helen is a little bit older than the
other d transitioners in the book, maybe about like five years and Helena,
she is quite the philosopher, and I drew from a lot of her sub
stacks for this book because I interviewed her at length as well. But I
think that some of her subs as are so powerful, particularly her substack on
pornography and transitions, and I highly recommend that people read them if you get
a chance. But Helena found a lot of gender content on Tumblr, and
that was a platform that she really dove into, and this was where she
was really exposed to gender ideology content, whereas Chloe Cole was really exposed to
gender content on Instagram and some of the other girls, Luca and Prisia,
they were on websites. One was called click or Kick I believe, which
has a huge pedophile problem. If you literally googled the name of the website,
all the articles are about how it has a pedophile problem, and I
was save for the more recent d transitioners. The problematic apps are Instagram,
Snapchat, and TikTok. TikTok is more of an up and coming one where
I think we're going to have some even more horrific and horrible stories coming out
of their given how the algorithms feed content, and how there are predatorial doctors
advertising their gender transition surgeries very effectively through TikTok. But Instagram come back to
that, when these young girls are getting on social media apps like that,
I think many women understand that girls in their teens are desperately looking for female
role models. They want to find someone that they think is beautiful, that
they can imitate, that they can be like, and they're constantly looking for
female mentorship and leadership. Well, when girls nowadays are going on social media
apps, they're seeing these very aggressive depictions of femininity. It's a woman who's
insanely beautiful, insanely sexual. She's probably posting scantily clad from some beautiful exotic
vacation and getting hundreds of thousands of likes of affirmation from men, and she
doesn't look anything like the twelve year old girl who's looking at her and thinking
this is what I'm supposed to be. She's very sexy, she's also,
you know, got amazing clothing. The little girl doesn't know that she's probably
face tuned and photoshopped her body and that she's using filters. These girls don't
know that. What they think is wow, that's what men want, and
I don't know how to be that. And multiple girls in the book told
me they had this experience. And I also asked them all how early they
were exposed to pornography, and pretty much all of them told me they were
exposed at a very early age to pornography. And Chloe, for example,
told me she was exposed pretty much as soon as she got on the internet.
And so they're seeing these very degrading and humiliating depictions of women in pornography.
One of the girls, Billy Eilish, said, by the way,
this is what Billy Eilis explained her androgynous sartorial choices as a response to influencers
and pornography. Yeah, because it's terrifying to young women. They don't know
what to do with it, and especially if they're looking at really hardcore pornography,
they're thinking that, as Prisha told me, that doesn't look fun for
the girls. It looks scary. It looks fun for the guys. And
so this warped view of sexuality and masculinity and femininity is incredibly toxic and bad
for them. And for someone like Chloe, she's thinking, I don't know
how to be that Instagram girl, and I don't want to be the poorn
girl. I think I want something else, And unluckily for her, she
was bumping into gender activists online who were telling her, Oh, it's because
you're a boy, didn't you know, And you don't have to be a
woman if you don't want to be. And that was the same experience,
in part for Prisha, who had been exposed to a lot of pornography.
She had been exposed to gender content, but she was also deeply struggling with
anorexia. And you know, that's something that many girls my age and in
my high school struggled with. I'm sure many of euro Peers also did.
Emily, and I've heard Schreier and others compare the social contagion aspect of transitioning
among teenage girls to the similar social contagion aspect of anorexia among teenage girls.
And Prisha unfortunately was kind of overlapping in these things, and as she struggled
with her anorexia and multiple other mental health issues, she was online in these
pro and communities this pro anorexia, and she said that it really overlapped with
transgender communities because the pro anorexia community encourages you to post progress photos, which
is really stickening because it's photos of you becoming aggressively skinnier and skinnier and in
effect starving yourself to death. They're also nudes, so it's taking advantage of
mentally ill girls who you know shouldn't be posting this stuff on the internet regardless,
but are also posting photos showing the progress of their very extreme mental illness.
And Pricia explained to me that a lot of this crosses over into the
trans community because the trans community also encourages progress photos that are nude photos as
well, and so she began to kind of bleed into both communities. And
she had been a victim of a rape which had really traumatized her and made
her reject her female body. She had also become pregnant as a result of
that rape and miscarried the baby as a result of her anorexia, which is
incredibly tragic and was so monumentally upsetting for Prishia. And at this point she
just wanted to get rid of her body. She felt like she had failed
as a woman, and she didn't want anything to do with it. And
so when she's being told by these transgender activists, oh, that's because you
never really were a woman, she was only too ready to believe them.
So that was kind of a roundabout way of answering your question. But you
know, social media absolutely was enabling all of these things. And I think
the combination, too, of access to really aggressively pornographic content is only furthering
the struggles that our young people today are having with understanding what real masculinity or
real femininity is and whether they live up to the images that they're seeing online.
I think even really good parents wildly underestimate the sort of vastness of the
internet, how quickly it forces people to mature. And I think this is
true even of parents today. It was certainly true of parents when I was
in high school, because you know, the iPhone came out when I was
almost graduated from high school, but even then, you know the blogosphere and
Tumbler and all kinds of different places Twitter. You know, if your kids
spending time online, they are finding these corners of the internet because those corners
of the Internet are coming to them via links that their friends send. Maybe
they have a right friend who's really into anime and their friends sends them a
link. I bet you talk to people who had anime was a gate yep
for them. Mary Margaret, Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's
other platforms that parents just like aren't totally understanding how dangerous they are, and
it might seem very simple. But the example I'm thinking of is one my
brother who's in his twenties. He doesn't really send us me anymore because I
don't even know if he's on the app anymore, but he used to send
me all the time screenshots of Snapchat's stories feature. And if you're not familiar
with what that is on Snapchat when you swipe left, Snapchat is just a
photo app you send pictures to friends. And I know they had a problem
with a lot of people sending inappropriate pictures, but I think Theoretically, parents
might be comfortable Snapchat because they think, oh, it's just you know,
they're sending pictures to their friends. And theoretically that could be true. But
if you swipe left, all of these little circles pop up, and those
are Snapchat stories and they're supposedly news stories. But the reality of the matter
is each one is picked and selected and curated by activist groups. And that's
not just a theory of mine. It literally will say it. So planned
parenthead has one, ACLU has one, glad has one, and it'll be
about the most random and sexually aggressive topics like masturbation, polyamory, threat poles,
abortions, all kinds of stuff, and they're geared at teenagers. So
my brother used to see some of this and send it to me, like
absolutely horrified at what Snapchat was putting out there geared at kids. And then
there would be advice on how to get in touch with activists, or you
know, if you think that you're you're queer, here's here's the kind of
thing to say to your parents, stuff like that, and you know that's
aimed at kids, is specifically targeting a certain demographic, and so these,
uh, these activist groups, So there was out there looking for it,
right, Like, that's no. The critical thing is that even if you,
you know, maybe you follow Donald Trump stuff on TikTok or whatever it
is, these groups will just count that or or the social media company themselves
in determining where the algorithm takes you. They're just like, oh, this
kid's into politics boom right exactly. And and so parents might not know that
too. You know, you might think you're being careful, but I don't
think you can be too careful on social media apps these days. And uh,
I think that in general the phone giving giving a young person a cell
phone, you you probably should understand that when you give your teenager uh cell
phone, you're task at least giving them also access to pornography. Even if
you look the foreign phone down, it's there's still going to be stuff that's
going to pop up or links that they're going to be able to access.
You're you're tacitly giving them access to pornography, adults access to them. Uh
that could be pedophiles, could be gender activists, could be uh, you
know, just predators. And then uh, you're also putting them at deep
risk of mental health issues. Which, uh, you know, establishment media
has done a decent job at reporting on the very, very negative effects that
Instagram and TikTok have on the mental health of young people. And actually,
when I was writing this book, I was reading one of those stories.
It might have been a Wall Street Journal story on Facebook and Instagram's internal conversations
about how they knew that they were causing teenage girls to commit suicide because of
all of the tragic mental health effects from their platforms. So as I'm reading
all of this, I'm thinking, there are so many young people who are
being pushed into gender transitions on social media, specifically from these apps. And
I was specifically thinking of TikTok and doctor gallaher this plastic surgeon who operates out
of Miami and advertises the surgeries she does, like double and sectomies on her
TikTok with really graphic photos and she's all like light and cheery about it.
It's one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen, but she gets her
patients and makes money by advertising all of this on TikTok. So I reached
out to TikTok and Instagram and I said, in light of these stories that
have just come out. Are you concerned about the fact that your platforms are
enabled kids to be pushed towards gender transitions? And of course they didn't get
back to me. It was something that they were particularly worried about in the
moment. But I think that's something that's worth pursuing in the future and finding
out how many young people are being driven towards gender transitions because of TikTok and
Instagram's algorithms, and should they be held accountable or pushing kids into irreversible decisions
that are going to mentally and physically affect them potentially for the rest of their
lives. Well, and let's continue talking about those mental and physical issues that
will follow them potentially for us of their lives. What patterns emerged when you
interviewed detransitioners about how these treatments affected them mentally and physically. What did,
if anything, did they share in common with their experiences. Yeah, so
everyone I talked to had both mental and physical repercussions to taking to stosterone and
estrogen. And I should know here I talk to more girls than guys,
mostly because this is an issue the dude's social contagion has been affecting more girls
as of late. But one of the chapters in my book, I think
is chapter eight is specifically about guys, and I really zone in zero in
on Able Garcia, who is a detransitioner. That was I really appreciate Able.
He was very vulnerable with me and shared so much and his experience is
really unique and sad, and I'm just very grateful for his participate participation in
this book. But when it comes to the girls and taking testosterone, everybody
told me that they quickly, they initially felt a burst of energy, because
there is a sort of honeymoon phase, as Chloe Cole I think called it,
where you have this sudden burst of energy and you know you were really
struggling before and now you have all this extra hormones in your body and you
feel really energetic, like you can conquer the world. And then the hormones
kind of start to set in. And what everyone told me was that they
would feel really intense feelings of rage and it would be mood swings. But
when the rage kind of came upon them, they would just not really know
what to do. Helena describes how she would go out and Chop would which
was her father's idea just to kind of get out this pent up rage because
it was just so overwhelming for her. Same thing, with this really intense
sexual urges. All the girls told me they did not know what to do
with that, and they were very surprised and just overwhelmed by these sexual urges
that they would feel. And then they began to notice that their skin was
feeling coarser, that their hair was also feeling coarser. They were losing hair
on their head or other places that they would expect hair to be and then
they were growing hair in places that they weren't used to, like their face.
And there was also a lot of changes in their bone density and their
muscle growth. And so when they now that they've de transitioned, uh,
they told me that some of their shoulders feel too heavy for their body because
of the way their muscle or their bones changed. So I think it's Chloe
Cole told me that her shoulders feel too heavy for her body, and she
feels all these weird aches and pains that she's not totally sure what's going on
there and how what should and shouldn't be happening, and what's dangerous and what's
not a lot of the de transitioners have lost sexual function. And Richie is
a DE transitioner who I mentioned kind of briefly in the book who unfortunately underwent
a genital uh A transition attempt. And I'm not going to get too graphic
here, but he I included his explanation of what his genitals now look like
post surgery and what he has to deal with in the aftermath of what these
doctors did to him, and it is one of the most crushing things I've
ever ever heard. It's incredibly sad. And the girls undergoing double museectomies,
Chloe Cole's scars have not fully healed yet. They still occasionally leak. She
doesn't really know why, but that unfortunately is the case for her, And
you know, many of them are concerned about whether they're going to be infertile.
I will say that Pricia Mosley, by some miracle, is about to
have a baby, which is so exciting, and I think Kelsey Bolar with
IWF has done some really great work documenting Pricia's story, and I think she's
currently working to help her document this birth as well, which is amazing.
But Pricia will be do in June and she's had a lot of complications with
this pregnancy, which I assume have are related to the many complications that she's
had from the hormones and from her attempted transition. So and then the lawsuits
really document this really well. One thing that I think the lawsuits really document
well is they harp on how these young girls could not give informed consent to
all of these procedures because they had no idea about all of these these effects
and repercussions on their bodies. They weren't explained to them. Nobody told them,
oh, you might have really heavy shoulders that ache and pain all the
time, regardless of whether you de transition or not. Nobody told them that
they might not be able to have kids someday. Nobody told them that their
breasts wouldn't grow back, which is one crazy factoid that a lot of young
women apparently who are trying to undergo gender transitions don't understand that your breast will
not grow back after you get a double misseectomy. And I'm rambling a little
bit here, but in the recent release of the w the recent release of
the w Path files showed that these doctors, the so called experts that are
cited so praised and lauded by places like The New York Times. These doctors
were having private conversations with each other where they were admitting that they knew the
testosterone caused tumors in one girl, that testosterone made another girl infertile. They
were talking about how one girl was so mentally ill that didn't really seem like
she could actually give informed consent. So they knew all of this, but
they're still pushing all of this publicly, the gender of forming care as if
it's you know, well researched and validated, and you know, as a
White House says gender firming care is critical for trans youth. That's the line
that everyone is pushing these days. And yet these so called experts were aware
and the people undergoing the surgeries were not so. At the end of the
day, all of this is experimental, and that's what should be being told
to someone like Chloe Cole when she's undergoing a hormone treatment. Someone should have
said, just so you know, we don't actually know what this is going
to do to you. It could render you sterile, you know, it
could cause you serious pain, It could cause your body to be very messed
up, and by the way. If it is, there's not going to
be any doctors to help you, because we're only interested in furthering gender transition,
not helping people who don't want to do it anymore. And that's a
serious problem too, where there's no doctors who are brave enough to help the
transitioners, so they seek medical help trying to figure out what's wrong with their
bodies. Then there's no one to help them. And that's exactly where I
wanted to go next, which is the powerful interests who misled so many of
these girls and boys. You mentioned the White House just now, but you
know, I think it's you'll actually probably know this better than I do,
is that it's HRC. I think they're like scorecard that they give it to
company or something like that. It's actually the sponsored literary Yes, Pharma.
So we just covered the White House, We've covered tech companies. You know,
the left, you know, the cultural left even really thinks that it's
still in some ways tethered to the economic left. Cultural Marxism and real Marxism.
People can debate whether or not one is inevitable after the other, but
they they really are clearly distinct on this particular issue. Because corporate interests have
prayed on these young people in very obvious ways, not corporate interest but also
powerful political interests. And maybe you can tell us a little bit about how
these young people were preyed on basically by these interests. Yeah, this is
I've written. I wrote about this a lot, I want to say,
during Pride Ment last year and really opened my eyes to how pervasive this issue
is. So the Human Rights Campaign, Uh, they have a scoring system
that they use, two different ones, and I'm actually probably more I'm just
not familiar with the other ones. One specifically for corporations. So it's called
the Corporate Equity Index. And what they do is they score all these major
corporations based on how affirming and you know, how well they live up to
the HRC standards for equity and inclusion and diversity. And what that means is,
if let's say Coca Cola doesn't put out some kind of pro trans messaging
during Pride Month, they may get scored against and not get one hundred percent
rating from the HRC. And the HRC is very good at kind of using
this and holding it over their heads to scare them into complying. And so
if you look Google your favorite corporation. Odds are they have a one hundred
percent score from the Human Rights Campaign. Odds are they have a press release
on their website saying, whatever you know, Coca Cola gets one hundred percent
rating from the Corporate HRC's Corporate Equity Index, and they they're very excited about
it, and they want everyone to see that they got this and to appreciate
that. You'll even see that from places like Fox News, are Fox Corporate
or Oreo random random corporations that you would probably be very surprised by. And
the HI see very much has a firm grasp on corporations right now, and
maybe a lot of these companies don't want to comply, but they have to
because there are implications there which I'm not even fully aware of, that will
very seriously impact them if they don't. Same goes for medical organizations and hospitals.
There's a HRC's I want to say it's the Medical Equity Index, but
I'm the first word might be different, but it does the same thing,
and they score hospitals based on the same criteria, and so hospitals are also
coming under the thumb of the HRC, which let's remember, is pushing very
ideological content. So the doctors who have taken an oath to do no harm
and are supposed to be basing their work and their life saving work on biology
and facts and science are very strong signals that prioritizing ideology will make them go
much farther in the good graces of the medical systems than factual and biological analysis.
Uh. And you know, I think a good example of this and
how far these places will go to cowtow to ideology. Helena told me that
when she she had just started taking to stosterone, which she got at a
Chicago planned parenthood, and she starts ingesting, injecting it into her leg,
and you know, she begins to have some very serious mental health effects,
very negative ones. She's struggling dramatically. So she checks herself into a Chicago
area hospital and when she checks in, she tells them she's a guy.
She gives them her male name and her male pronouns. But they knew that
biologically she was a woman. It's on her forms, and they were aware.
They also knew that she was taking tastosterone. But Helena told me that
when this hospital was treating her, the medical professionals there made a decision.
They pretended she was a guy who needed mental health help, and so they
prescribed her a bunch of different antidepressants and other drugs to help her, pretending
she's a guy that has mental health problems and ignoring the reality that she's a
woman who has mental health problems because she's taking tistosterone and so, you know,
they completely ignored the source of her troubles and instead prioritized ideology over facts
and science to push this fake narrative and that story. It might sound kind
of complicated or trivial, but I think it's a really good example of how
serious this situation is, where we have our doctors who are supposed to be
able to trust with their lives, pretending something that is fake so they can
further a narrative that isn't even going to make us feel better. And that
story really disturbed me. I went over the details of it with her multiple
times because I couldn't believe it. But that that is a reality that we're
facing, and you know that that is also a very scary factor when it
comes to students that are coming out of medical schools, students that are being
trained right now and are being taught to prioritize ideology over facts and science.
They're being taught that if you don't prioritize ideology over facts and science, that
you could be in danger, your reputation, your job might be at stake.
And all of this, I think should really scare us. So well
said and I said, Pharma, But I met Pfizer. I actually looked
it up while you were talking about Margaret. It's their Healthcare Equality Index and
there's a big Pfizer logo right on the damn website. So could you tell
this just before we wrap who's making money off of all of this. I
think planned parenthood is an important player in that. But it has to as
you do this reporting and at the same time talk to these young people,
it has to just be gutting watching so many people like literally profit off of
this. Oh yeah, And I mean these are young people who it's not
like they're using daddy's money to pay for their surgeries. I mean some of
them might be. Pa Precia, for example, was working at Panera trying
to make enough money to pay for her surgery, which was promised to her
to make her happy. You know, this is more trans identifying people in
the lower socioeconomic brackets than the higher. It's like their studies showing that it's
it's unreal, and and and so you know, she's desperately trying to scrape
together enough money for her double misctomy. And then when she actually goes through
with the double misactomy, she has to wait a long time for her scars
to heal. She can't even raise her arms for fear of tearing her scarring,
and Panera fired her because she couldn't come into work, so she had
to go into debt over her surgery. Just really very upsetting a stead of
circumstances. So you know she's paying for those surgeries. But take a step
back to the hormones. I think the Daily Wire. Greg Ray, who
used to work for Tucker and now he works for Matt Walsh, he didn't
undercover investigation with one of these hormone companies that sell testosterone and estrogen and they'll
ship it to you in discrete packaging so that your family is not sure what
you're receiving. Greg went undercover, But I kind of laugh when I say
that, because he didn't totally go undercover. He just made a very casual
call and did a video interview with one of these organizations I believe it was
Folks Folx and asked them about getting hormones, and they just fast tracked him
to go through the process and get hormones, didn't even question that he wasn't
even trying to act as though he identified as a woman. And I documented
my book all these subscription services that will send testosterone an estrogen to your house,
and I want to say it's upwards of one hundred dollars a month just
on that one subscription. But the fact of the matter is that you're not
just signing up for this for a couple months. If you're taking testosterone,
the idea is that you're going to take it for the rest of your life
so that you are feeling like a man. And so the idea behind a
lot of this is that you are embarking on a very costly journey that you're
going to have to continue paying for for many years to come. And by
the way, when you so you let's say you begin on puberty blockers like
Chloe Cole, then you go onto stosterone, then you get a double missectomy.
The next step which you'll be encouraged to take because if you if you
truly want to be a man, you got to get rid of it.
Is getting a hysterectomy, and that's a really invasive surgery, and it's not
a surgery that you can actually see the effects of. And that's a really
weird one because for Chloe, for example, getting a double misectomy, yeah,
you can see that is a very visible sign of and it can help
you very much pass as they say, as a guy. The hysterectomy is
more mental. It's knowing that you don't have a uterus anymore. And then
they'll also encourage you to get bottom surgery to try and get fake genitalia that
sometimes is constructed out of your test sense so that you can look like you
have fake male genitalia that doesn't work obviously, that you'll be told can work,
and you'll be encouraged to use in a sexual capacity, which is all
just mind blowing because this is fake, doesn't work, and it's just an
ew factor that I don't really know how a lot of these people overcome,
but we're asked to kind of overlook. And then for the men, when
it comes to genital surgeries, that's even more painful, and there's the construction
of a fake cavern that is a wound that is constantly trying to heal and
they have to dilate it or al say it will close. And that's just
kind of a life long, awful, wretched circumstance of pretending to be a
woman with something that is painful and smells and continues to try and heal,
and you are the one and actively keeping it from healing. So the whole
thing is just so disturbing. And yet these are surgeries that you pay for,
that you're encouraged to get, and you can keep going down the line.
You want facial femininization, go for it. You want to sculpt your
body so that you look on your fat is in different places and you don't
look as much like a woman or a man. That's encouraged too, And
it just goes on and on and on. So for the people who do
go through a lot of these surgeries, my heart goes out to them because
the amount of money and pain, both mental and physical, that they are
enduring trying to find this happiness that is promised to them. It is just
incredibly sad and I find it very borderlined A spiritual warfare there, and that
they're being promised happiness. That is not something that medical professional should be promising
anyone. You know, we can promise health perhaps or maybe increase in health
or pain relief, but the idea that you can sell someone happiness based on
your ideological persuasions, it's just, honestly, it's evil to me. And
before we close, I wanted to ask Mary Margaret what you would say.
You've probably had these conversations, although they're also probably too far in between,
too far and few in between, with people on the left who say,
listen, I know someone who transitioned five years ago. You know, they
were able to get those puberty blockers and they're now in their twenties and they
are happily living as a transitioned person. You're cherry picking these stories of de
transitioners. You know, it's not for everyone, but there are cases.
I mean, actually, even Hillary cass As you well know, stop short
of saying that this should never be a treatment for children period. You know,
it's just bravely skeptical of many of the treatments. But there are a
whole lot of people that would say this is an important treatment to maintain access
to I know people who have benefited from it. It is right for some
people. What would you say to them, Mary Margaret, I would say,
first of all, that it is never the right decision to try and
transition a child. I also would argue that it's never the right decision to
try and transition an adult. Now, you may disagree with that. I
think there's potentially room for disagreement there, especially depending on what you believe religiously
and whether you have religious grounds for objecting to a transgender or an adult trying
to become transgender. I think that from a secular standpoint, you can never
fully transition someone. That's just not possible. And I think we need to
be realistic about that. Maybe it will relieve certain symptoms of gender dysphor you
to try to do certain surgeries or hormonal interventions. For an adult, maybe
it will slightly relieve the genderdice for you, but they are not going to
actually become a woman or a man if they were not biologically created that way.
And I think we need to be realistic about that. Some of this
stuff may relieve genderdice for you, that doesn't mean it's the right thing to
do. And I think we need to be a little more factual when it
comes to that. For kids, I'm sorry, I just I don't see
a world in a way in which any of this is good for them.
Even if someone says, oh, well, you know, I had to
find that one on puberty blockers, and now they're thriving as a transgender adult,
you know what. The thriving aspect of that, I think is usually
highly exaggerated. For a little boy that goes on puberty blockers, odds are
his testicles are going to never fully form. That's not something that we're willing
to talk about. And the experiment isn't complete for many of them. I
mean it's not yours is not seventy. You know, if you're somebody who
transitions when you're fifteen years old, you have what sixty more years of life
to live on average? Oh yeah, yeah, And I've been doing this
for what Because there's an argument that, like, well, people have been
prescribed puberty blockers for twenty plus years for other things et cetera, et cetera,
early periods. But a lot of that is inflated too. They'll say
people have been prescribed puberty blockers for X amount of years. But like what
they're not telling you is they've been prescribed for early puberty, maybe not for
gender dice for you. So there's a lot of manipulation there too, and
I think a lot of it is coming from a manipulative place when you see
pulling on this. For example, asking Americans if they support gender affirming care
is not a legitimate question. Asking Americans if they support transgender surgeries, hormones
and puberty blockers for minors, that is a legitimate way, And what you'll
find when you ask it is that most Americans don't support those things. So
I think that's a big part of the issue here is that most Americans,
and I would say globally this is an issue too, are not being given
the full information on this topic, and so public opinion is a little skewed
when it comes to these things because a lot of it is represented in terms
of empathy. You know, the word care is thrown around so much.
Would you deny care to trans youth? They want you to think that,
the media outlets and organizations want you to think that some kind of vital care
is being denied to kids who identify as trans. Well, No, it's
not like they're being denied antibiotics for strep throat, which is I think what
some of these places want you to think when you read their headlines. They're
being denied all these treatments that they can get when they're an adult if they
choose, but they're being given a shot at childhood and innocent and not having
those things taken away from them before they can fully consent. Just you know,
Mary Margaret, congratulations on the book, Congratulations on your career. It's
it's just such a privilege to watch your work play out and to know that
you're doing covering hard stories like this over at the Daily Signal and again.
The book is called d trans True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult.
It's out right now. Make sure you pick up a copy. It's such
an important, such an important piece of reporting. So Mary Margaret, thanks
for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Emily, of course
you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist for radio hour. I'm Emily
Dashinsky, culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be back soon. Until
then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the frame earned the fame by
the reason, and then it faded away mm hmm.