We're back with another edition of The Federalist or Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashenski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR
ls T, make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and you
can get an ad free version of our website over at the Premium section of
the Federalist dot com as well. Today, I'm very honored to be joined
by Shannon Thrace. Shannon is the author of a memoir called eighteen Months,
a memoir of a marriage lost to gender identity. She writes at Shannon Thrace.
That's t h r Acee dot substack dot com. Fascinating substack over there,
Shannon, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much
for having me, Emily. I listened to a couple of episodes, and
I think it's a really cool show, and I also think you have a
really great voice. Oh well, thank you. That's so kind. I
want to start actually by reading, just for some context, your publisher's description
of your book, because I feel like it covers so much ground and gives
a lot of helpful background that people might want. Going into this conversation,
it reads Shannon is no stranger to alternative lifestyles. Raised by Christian parents in
bluegrass countries, she fled to the city, scraped together in education, worked
for drag shows, and befriend at poets and anarchists at clothing optional parties.
But the time she settled into her fourteen year relationship with Jamie, she had
dated women and experimented with polyamory. So when her husband begins cross dressing,
she sees no problem. She enjoys flouting the straight world's pointless rules. Trouble
is brewing, though Jamie dives into Jamie's dive into the world of identity leads
to shifting values, sexual dysfunction, and a crippling depression. Still deeply in
love with the kind, outdoorsy folksinger she once knew, Shannon has committed to
work through these challenges, but she's blindsided by the unusual demands of gender dysph
you and there's the hard way that compassion, communication, and even love sometimes
just aren't enough Shannon. This is an incredibly personal memoir. Obviously memoir kind
of inherent in the genre, but this especially in the climate that we're in
today had to have been difficult to write. The Amazon reviews are fantastic for
the book, people are I know, I'm humbled by yes, I mean
wow. I go and look at Amazon reviews sometimes and these were really,
really positive. So folks should check out this book. But can you tell
us just a little bit about the process of putting together this experience or this
these this lifetime of experiences into book format. Yeah, that's that's an interesting
question. Certainly, when I got a divorce spoiler, it changed my life
in a lot of ways. I had actually not only lost my marriage,
but we had recently moved, so I was in a new place. I
had lost a lot of friends over some of the politics around the situation.
I had changed jobs, and yeah, just a lot. A lot was
crazy for me, and obviously I wanted to process what I'd been through,
and it was very, very hard to get any kind of support. It
was very hard to find people who would listen to me and really be open
minded about what I had gone through. There was a lot more support for
my ex husband, who I called Jamie, but there wasn't a lot for
me, excuse me. And so one of the things I started to do
was write. And when I started writing, at first, I wasn't sure
if I was going to turn it into a memoir or not. It was
on my mind, but I was nervous. I was nervous about how it
would be received. I was afraid that Jamie would come after me. I
didn't actually want to embarrass him. I did still care about him, and
there's certain aspects of the story that are certainly very embarrassing to him, I
think. But I just dove in and started writing, and as I got
into it, I realized, yeah, there are ways I can solve these
problems. And also I just really want to tell the story, and I'm
going to do it. And it took a while, but in some parts
were definitely much harder than others, just the relieve and the emotions and all
that kind of stuff. But I decided I was going to go through with
it, and I did amazing. Just reliving all of that also must have
been difficult, especially actually, and maybe this is a good question too,
in the political context, because over the course of all of these experiences in
your lifetime, the politics were shifting a lot. And that's one thing I
think is really interesting about your story that you know that it was very normal,
you know, in decades prior for someone who's kind of raised it a
conservative Christian household or area of the country, red state, to rebel by
becoming or by exploring sexual libertine and ideas and lifestyles and all of that.
That's kind of just sort of changing. There's something very conformist now, as
Abigail Schreyer documented in her book about the social contagion of alleged gender dysphoria in
certain cases and very real gender dystoria in other cases. How did that play
into your experience? You're sort of being growing up in a very conservative environment
and then that sort of shifts over the course of your lifetime. That's kind
of interesting to me. Yeah, I think, well, I'm glad you
read that blurb. I didn't actually realize how much of my story is contained
in that blurb, but it gives me some shortcuts where I don't have to
say everything again. But yeah, obviously I did have a bit of a
wild past in my twenties and maybe early thirties. I think that I want
to address whether or not I rebelled. I think there was always a seed
of me that was very open minded and free spirited and all that kind of
stuff. But I was also a very devout fundamentalist Christian, so I had
a lot of conflicts with that. But I did, as you said,
pursue some pretty wild times in my youth. And I think that when Jamie
and I got together, we were maybe still at the tail end of that
phase and he was kind of in it too, But as we got to
know each other, this is something I think maybe isn't represented in the blurb.
We had a really really great, really close relationship and very very loving,
and I think it just grew and as it grew, you know,
and as we aged, maybe that had a little bit to do with it,
But I think more than anything, just our love together had most to
do with it. Was that we just kind of outgrew some of that and
we kind of became more interested in being monogamous and caring and loving and kind
of had felt like we had lived through some of that and that it was
kind of behind us. But it also certainly affects my worldview. And when
Jamie began to cross stress, I didn't have a problem with it because it
just didn't really feel like a big deal. So for me, with the
past I'd had, and with my openness to dating women and my openness to
going to drag shows and going to gay bars and all that kind of stuff,
this didn't seem like a big deal. And at first when he first
began to cross stressed, it wasn't a big deal. So I think that
did help me certainly be the kind of person who could accept that. You
know the story, and I think of it as a sort of erstwhile Kardashian
viewer does have some parallels with probably the most high profile celebrity experience that mirrors
yours in a marriage that was dissolved, and Chris Jenner sort of had known,
we learned Kim had known Kim Kardashian had known that Bruce Jenner at the
time was crush dressing, was interested in that had some possible struggles with dysphoria.
Can you talk a little bit about how specifically the context of being married
to somebody that's experience experiencing some of this how is that because we hear so
much about children, but if you could talk to us a little bit about
what you learned This is a huge question, obviously, but what you learned
being in a marriage to an adult who is experiencing some of these struggles.
I think that would be really helpful. Yeah, so our relationship and our
situation evolved a little bit over time. So the first thing that Jamie did
was begin to cross dress. And this happened after about with looking at porn.
And it was care free, it was sexual, it was fun.
He didn't consider it to be serious. He even started a blog and wrote
a lot about how he wasn't trans, he was a cross dresser. He
was expressing his feminine side. He didn't think it was a big deal.
People should feel free to, you know, cross gender roles or expectations things
like that. And then over time things changed a little. So first it
was almost overnight really that it seemed developed. He actually developed gender dysphoria.
And I think that's something that people don't always know, is that these guys
who are straight and who are older or straight leaning at least, they do
develop gender dysphoria. And so he began to hate his body and hate his
face and all this kind of stuff. And that was a really strange thing
to watch because he had actually been very, very carefree before, really outdoorsy,
really kind of could roll with anything. Didn't seem to care what people
thought, and so watching him develop gender dysphoria was really odd, and then
watching it progress, and I think also it was one thing, just what
he was going through personally, but then it was also augmented by things that
he was reading online. So he was spending a lot of time on social
media, spending time in transgender support group, cross dresser message boards, all
sorts of things like that. And as that progressed, his views started to
change, and his dysphoria actually got worse. In my opinion, I think
that the more he talked about rolling with this and identifying as a woman and
becoming his true authentic self, the sadder he got. The more depressed he
got. He began to cry every single night, literally every night. After
a certain point after about it, about the eighth month mark, he was
crying constantly. He was triggered by things people said, he was unhappy with
how he looked. All of this was really really odd because it just didn't
fit his personality before. So I think that's some of the things that jump
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Yeah, that's so interesting, and because again the dysphoria conversation especially and I
just mentioned Abigail Shreier surrounding young women social contagion and this explosion in young women
in particular experiencing gender dysphoria, which is a shift from how gender dysphoria diagnoses
patterns in yours previous have been with a lot of men prior to a higher
proportion of men experiencing gender dysphoria historically. This is another really big question.
But the left gets a lot of really important things wrong about transgenderism gender dysphoria.
The right also gets a lot of important things wrong about gender dysphoria.
And I wanted to ask Shannon, as somebody who's sort of found themselves in
the middle of this giant political issue right now, what you think some of
those things are, you know, from the left and from the right as
it stands today in twenty twenty three. What is kind of everybody getting wrong
about all of this? Yeah, that's interesting. I think I can probably
speak more to the left than to the right, because that's more my world.
I think that if there's anything going on on the right, it might
just be that some people disagree with gender nonconformity, however it presents, so
they don't like it, regardless if the person says their trands or not.
I think that's something I observe. But on the left, I don't even
know where to be, and I think that maybe almost everything is wrong.
I mean, one thing that really jumps out of me, and this is
why I wrote my story, is that there is a myth that people are
unhappy before they transition. They know they're trans they're miserable, they're not living
their authentic lives, and then when they transition, they become happier, better,
healthier, all the things, and I observe the exact opposite. So
before Jamie cross dressed, especially, I never heard a word about being trans
or gender nonconformity or anything like that. He was actually rather gender conforming.
He had a giant lumberjack beard. For a large portion of our marriage,
he was an outdoorsy guy. He wore cargo shorts and flannel, and he
had actually gone through some fashion phases because he was a musician, and he
would sometimes play around with something like cowboy shirts with embroidered birds, things like
that, But by and large, all of these looks were mostly masculine.
Maybe maybe he'd wear a poet shirt, maybe he'd wear ear rings something like
that. But yeah, I'm trying to remember exactly what you asked. Some
of these things like big top line things that people continue to get yeah,
yeah, yeah yeah. So Jamie did not feel gender non conforming before and
then get better afterward. He actually became aware of dysphoria and gender non conformity
during the cross dressing and became worse. And I really felt like he the
more he would maybe put on some eyeliner or put on a necklace, the
more he would notice that, hey, I have a square jaw. And
it's it's manly and now I don't like that, And so that's that's one
big thing. Yeah, that he seemed to get worse instead of better.
I also think, yeah, with kids, of course, you know this
idea that kids know who they are. I mean, I think that we
can see, you know, even with adults, that lots of them don't
know who they are. There's there's famous people who keep changing their identity.
So I don't know why we think that children are better at figuring that out
than adults are. I think that the left is obsessed with transphobia. And
if you you know, if you don't clap and cheer for everything that occurs,
then that's an accusation. You'll hear just the fact that I report on
what happened, the fact that I report on the fact that he was unhappy
that he uh started with porn and that this was a sexual interest. That's
something I'm not allowed to say. I'm not allowed to say that he got
worse instead of better. I'm not allowed to say that our sex life was
impaired, because there seems to be a myth that I don't know, they
live happier, healthier lives in every capacity right, And to me, that's
kind of obvious that if people are modifying their sex organs are seeking to do
so, then that's going to affect sex. And of course it did.
Yeah, just everything. I think there's a lot of myths floating around,
and almost everything I observed was far more unhappy and than it was supposed to
be. Yeah, no, I mean that also brings me to another question
I wanted to ask, because you know, these conversations, especially to the
point you just made, there's a lot of conversations mad about what the left,
which at least culturally is in control of so many institutions at least for
now, gets wrong about dendrysphoria through transideology and all of that. But you
know, there aren't as many people who are able to speak to the pains
that people who are like actually really undergoing, either you know, the traumas
that are inflicted by bad political ideologies that are being mainstreamed, or by extremely
real dysphoria with their body. All of these things are actually very traumatic and
very real, and I think your memoir speaks to that, and I wanted
to see if you could tell us a little bit more about what it was
like watching someone struggle with all of this. I mean, did you have
to sort of find through maybe through research or through the experience itself, the
language even to describe or understand what was unfolding in your own house. Yeah,
I certainly didn't know what was going on. This was twenty fifteen,
and you alluded earlier to this being sort of a time when things were changing,
and from everything I read, this is pretty much the cusp of when
things changed, like he was riding the wave, like right on top of
it. I think that the political you alluded to the political environment or ideologies
affecting people as well as the genuine dysphoria. I think those two things interact.
I think that spending a lot of time obsessing about your identity and how
you look and how you present and what people think of you and whether they're
thinking what you want them to think, is that's an unhealthy state, and
that's a state I think that appeared to exacerbate dysphoria. I don't know why
it wouldn't, but certainly, yeah, I saw I saw Jamie struggling with
things that I definitely had no words for and no experience with. And I
mean one of the things that really was strange for me is that since I
accepted Jamie's cross dressing, and since he was going online saying that he was
cross dressing for fun and that it wasn't a big deal, when that started
to turn it was very very baffling to me. And the fact that he'd
been pretty masculine in the past, so when he started to say that he
was literally a woman, for example, instead of just identifying as one or
dressing as one, this was just out of left field for me, and
I didn't know. I just didn't know where that was coming from. And
it affected our communication because I was interested in continuing as we always had,
was having really personal and real and deep conversations and really being intimate in that
way. And he, on the other hand, had been reading things online
and had started to, you know, sort of think of some things as
dog whistles or as triggering or all this kind of stuff, And so there
were things that I couldn't talk to him about anymore, and sometimes I didn't
understand why, so I would just be like, well, why can't we
talk about this? But what he was hearing was, you know, when
people say this, they mean that, or you know when people say this,
they're transphobic, or when people ask you a question, you don't owe
them an answer, and you know all this kind of stuff, and so
yeah, I was baffled for quite a while. So my book is called
eighteen Months. That's the eighteen months between the moment that he first cross dressed
and the moment of our divorce, And somewhere around month ten I started to
really well. Around month ten is when he went from cross dressing too identifying
strongly as trans and then a little but after that, somewhere between the tenth
and the eighteenth months is when I began to think this may not work out
because I just can't I can't figure out what's going on. And around that
time I also happened to cross an essay by Anne Lawrence on auto gaynophilia.
And I don't actually usually use that word or talk about that much because I'm
not a doctor, and I also just don't like to use a lot of
terminology. I'd rather just report on what I saw, But I will say
that that essay really opened my eyes and really made me understand that what was
happening was pretty big, and pretty irreversible and pretty damaging to our relationship because
Jamie had started to take a bigger interest in himself than in me, and
there's really no way to recover from that, because the relationship is all about
your person, you know, it's reciprocal, and it wasn't going to be
that way anymore. So. Yeah, I kind of learned the language and
gathered information as I went, and a lot of it I really didn't have
until it was all over. Do you think in some I don't know.
I don't want to say parallel universe, but could this have manifested in a
different way in Jamie if the online climate was different, if it hadn't been
sort of put on a silver platter that if you're dealing with X, Y
and Z pains anxiety depression, consider that maybe you're in the wrong body,
Consider that maybe this is a manifestation of gender dys for you, something like
that. It could it have manifested in a different way, in a different
cultural climate. Do you think it was a sort of culturally acceptable manifestation of
anxiety and depression and all of the different struggles with modernity. Yeah, I
think it's definitely a culturally bound situation. Whether he found himself in descriptions of
pain. I don't know. I mean, as possible. I think of
this more as something that began with cross dressing. It began with something lighthearted.
He really didn't seem to be in pain before that. But either way,
certainly what he came to believe about himself was found online. I mean,
I think that's that's really obvious. I mean, I think that the
way people are talking about this is very obviously different from the way it was
maybe ten years prior to that. Yeah, that's really interesting. And there
was a super interesting point you made on your substack recently. You were it
was a quick post, and I imagine you're working on something based on the
post. It sounds like you're working on something about both the Louise Perry and
Mary Harrington books, and you kind of previewed you're thinking of both about both
of these books and a substack post, and Louis and Mary have both on
the show and talked a little bit about their books. You write, to
be clear, there's a coherent argument to be made that most women are best
served by minimizing sex, getting married, avoiding birth control, and having children.
But that's a conservative argument, not a feminist one. If you're a
conservative. It's okay to own that. It goes without saying that sex positive
feminists have gone too far in their enthusiasm for male centric, unsatisfying sex.
But the narrative that women don't or shouldn't want sex until they're ready to start
a family is damaging too, because it isn't true. It's led more than
a few of my friends to neglect birth control, to persist in abusive relationships,
to marry hastily, or to have children with men they shouldn't have accepted
a second date from. I can't help but think that a pendulum has swung
from one unhealthy extreme to the other. As only Fans Superstar Ils said on
a recent Cut The Cut the Whole podcast, there almost seems to be a
conservative idea emerging in feminist circles. If you're having sex, you're losing value,
And the reason you know it certainly is a conservative. I would own
the conservative argument. The reason I was curious to ask you about that is
especially because you've been mentioning pornography and pornography going back to Andrew Dwarkin versus Camille
Paulia has been such a sort of central conversation or a central point of feminist
disagreement. And so as we're kind of questioning the swing of the pendulum and
where it's about to land, which still seems up in the air. But
as we're thinking about those things, how are you working through the question of
pornography and maybe even only fans and all of these things online given your own
very personal experience with them in your own life. Yeah, that's a great
question. I forgot I wrote that. So, yeah, that was neat
to hear that. I think. Yeah, I could have said when you
said, what are some of the things that left is getting wrong? I
could have also added this idea that pornography is just unequivocally fantastic and great for
everyone and always a good thing. I mean, yeah, I think that.
Wow, there's a lot to say about pornography. I have always been
of the opinion that pornography is largely bad, especially for the actors and people
involved in it, but that we're all human and I've looked at it and
okay, you know, forgive myself, move on that kind of thing,
right, That's always been my view. And so another thing that happened in
twenty fifteen at the cusp of all this is that I learned that my view
that pornography is overarchingly not great was controversial among liberals, which I found hilarious
and weird. And it's not like I'm even obviously, it's not like I'm
even a person who's judging people for that, or who's overly obsessed with it,
or who has, you know, shunned it in my own life life
at every turn, right, So, but I was really surprised just to
learn that people are offended if you say that there's anything wrong with it.
People are willing to defend the most vile examples of it. People are willing
to turn a blind eye to the worst aspects of it. You know,
I'll sometimes hear someone say, well, you know not that many of those
women are actually trafficked. Well, I don't think we know that. But
also like what a weird view, Like how many is too many? Like
if some of the women at your local coffee shop were trafficked, wouldn't you
boycott it? Like, you know, if it was five percent, you
probably would, right, So all of those things were really a surprise to
me when I learned them. And for now, I think, you know,
my view is the same as it's always been. I think it's something
that's interesting to people that can be possibly integrated into your life in a healthy
way, especially it's hard to know, but especially if the origins of it
are not exploitative. But I also think that there's a lot about it that's
bad. Obviously, there's a there's a lot of terrible, terrible things depicted.
The things that are depicted are harmful to the people acting in the in
the films or or images much of the time, if not always, they
are uh. They create misogynistic images of women. They obviously uh. Porn
is obviously addictive for especially for some men. There's there's men who I here
cannot perform because of their addiction to porn. Uh. And so there's there's
lots to say about porn, and I think my view on it is very
moderate, if not, I don't know. I don't want to say conservative,
because I don't think that's true. But at the same time, it's
not a great part of our culture, and it's it's really weird to me
that it's controversial to acknowledge that well. And it actually reminds me of another
thing that I thought was very incisive that you wrote on your sub stack you.
You were talking about one of my favorite podcasts, The Rest is History,
and a recent episode they did on the Marquis de Sade. Another person
that Apolia. I'm a huge Palia fan who wrote about in Sexual Persone and
you wrote about you say, the French author and sexual degenerate from whom the
turn Sadism is derived. Sad was known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for
sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography. I knew from Sexual Persone that Sod had
written of eviscerating a buoy a girl and swapping their genitals and uncanny, canny
image and our social and medical landscape. What I didn't know is that Sod
was an enthusiastic cross dresser. Shall we call him trans? We mustn't suggest
that gays or the gender just work are perverts, of course, but is
there any reason to believe that perverts indulge in everything but homosexual and transsexual behavior?
And one of the slow normalization of fringe sex via porn it's caused an
increased in surprise choking, Why couldn't it cause an increase in queerness? Can
you talk a little bit about that, especially with what you were just talking
about in pornography misogyny that in some sense it reminds me a lot of what
you're saying about, Jamie, that there's something being given to us online that's
almost like a template and almost like a prescription for pains or indulging in you
know, previously sort of stigmatized sexual appetites that just sort of allows you to
normalize it. There's something very strange about that. Yeah. I think one
thing that has happened is that I actually tweeted a diagram about this recently.
We used to say let's accept benign diversity something like that, such as gay
people who are in adult relationships with other consenting adults. Then we begin to
say let's celebrate benign diversity, which I never thought was necessary. I know
a lot of LGB folks think that was never necessary. You know, we
kind of just want to live our lives and be able to show up at
the work Christmas party with our partner. It's not about, you know,
throw confetti for me or you know, design a flag for me. So
that was a weird shift, and not an obvious bad one, I guess,
but just unnecessary. And then there was a parallel effort to accept all
sexual diversity, even if it was maybe a little more on the whole harmful
side or on the troubling side. And so then between the effort to accept
more kinds of unusual sexual behavior and the effort to celebrate instead of accept,
we've come to a point where we celebrate harmful sexual behavior. So it's like,
all come to this point where you really can't say anything bad about anything
or you'll be some kind of something fobe. I don't know. Yeah,
I do think that is that has contributed to a culture where being sexually different
is popular, just as being any kind of diversity is popular right now,
and sexual diversity or gender identity diversity is acquirable, or at least you can
say you have it. You know, you can't say or another race,
because we can look at you and we can tell. But you can say
that you're queer, you can say that you're non binary, you can say
that you're trans, and all you have to do is say it, and
now you're in. And so there's a lot of cultural cachet to be gotten
from saying that. And I don't think there's any way that that hasn't entered
in to the explosion of trans identities and to Jamie's identity. I mean,
I think that when I look back, there are a lot of things I
didn't see coming. One thing I do know about Jamie is that he did
have a bit of an ego. He did enjoy attention, He did enjoy
applause. He was a musician, and so when he began to get applause
for cross dressing and maybe a little bit more applause for saying he was trans,
I definitely think that was a factors sort of like Christopher lash culture of
narcissism and our currency changing, and then you have social media coming into the
mix and making that a very material kind of currency and immediate kind of currency.
And that actually is another thing you wrote about in this point about Marquis
de Sade, and you know, questions about as Polly has written the Roman
Empire and decadence and all of that, and as we're kind of trying to
think about what the line might be between LGB and the t you know,
what is where's the tipping point and what's causing some of this and what's giving
you know, what's making this template suddenly so alluring for people who are maybe
narcissistic, or have those tendencies of their personalities, or are in pain emotionally,
whatever it is, how is this sort of what is it? From
your perspective deeper in our culture? That's the is it? Do describe a
lot of this to a decadence? Is it a high tech decadence? Is
it a wealth decadence? Is it all of it? What sort of was
the catalyst for something that happened so quickly here? Yeah? You mean culturally,
right? Yep? Yeah, yeah, certainly I wrote about decadence and
that article that you're talking about. It came to my attention recently that the
Roman empire that fell, they were wealthy, and so they were probably bored.
And so I had always kind of wondered what sexual decadence or gender diversity
had to do with the fall of an empire, because I certainly don't think
that like, well behaved of adult gay people are bringing down the empire or
anything. So it's kind of like, well, what is it then?
And it seems to be that thing I talked about where it's not that gay
people are getting perverse, it's that perverse people are accepting gayness and clearness and
transsexualism is something to do because they're too comfortable. Yeah, I think that
I've heard it said that LGBU those are sexual orientations and those are just realities
about a person, whereas the T and Q are political positions. Really,
and so I think that it's really a big topic. But obviously postmodernism post
structuralism in academia has filtered out into the wider culture, and that kind of
stuff just kind of repeats a lot of really bad ideas like tear it all
down, and yeah, all systems are corrupt and all systems are sexist and
racist and intrinsically so and you know, defund the police and all that kind
of stuff. And so, I mean, one thing that I think is
wrong with those ideas, beyond the obvious, is that they don't have any
solutions that can replace them. So it's not defund the police and instead,
let's lower crime by doing X, Y and Z. Is just tear it
down, let's see what happens. And so it's very anarchists, and I
do think that material wealth and comfort and privilege is entering into that. I
think that people who think that you can tear it all down are blessedly unaware
of what it would be like if we did that. Yeah, there's a
lot, there's a lot contributing to those views. That is a big topic.
Yeah, And I also wonder again, as somebody who grew up in
a religion and a special religious but especially a conservative Christian environment, you know
what declining religiosity has meant for this trend. If I don't mean that to
be a leading question, there's genuinely curious as to how you think that factors
into it, or even overbearing religiosity. And this is just another possibility in
red state areas that had a sort of suffocating gender binary or sexual binary.
How did this play into everything and how does it play into it now?
Yeah, I don't know if I feel like the religion, for example,
the religion I was raised with, or the religions that I see around me
per se, are affecting all of this as much as kind of the older
and more general idea of Nietzsche's death of God. So it's kind of like,
as we need God less because we don't need God to explain the cosmos
because we have science, and we don't need God to of moral moral prescriptions
because we can figure those out logically and we can figure out what's best for
the most people, and we can. We can use more secular systems to
determine morality and do a pretty good job at it, and sometimes better because
we you know, there are old Testament statements that say you can beat your
slave as long as the stick isn't too large and things like that. So
so we don't need God as much, We don't believe in God as much
because some of those things that cause us to believe are gone. But with
that, we have also lost the good parts of religion, which are community
and a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning in life, and all
of that definitely undermines people's happiness and purpose and health and makes people not know
what to do. And I think primesome for up doing these sorts of alternative
structures of meaning. It's something that I call the crisis of modernity, and
I write about it a lot in my substack and elsewhere. But yeah,
I think that when I first lost my religion and became kind of an annoying
new atheist, which I hope i'm past, I thought that the idea of
the God shaped hole was really stupid and annoying, and I was like,
I don't feel like I need a God. I don't miss God. But
I think that it's a meaning shape hole. I think it's it's a more
general concept that I was taking it as. I don't think that God shaped
hole means that every atheist is sitting around pining for what they've lost explicitly or
looking for a new God. But it does mean that purpose is no longer
are quite as obvious, and the meaningfulness of the universe, and the maybe
the idea that everything happens for a reason, or the idea that the things
that are happening to you or for a reason you lose sad stuff. And
I think that can make some people feel really unmoored and make them flock toward
belief systems that aren't healthy. And another question of that, maybe another variable
is about class. There's a lot of sort of interesting things going on there.
But do you see that In fact, one of the interesting things,
as I'm stumbling through this question, is that you know, to some extent,
this is across classes. This is affect affected you know, girls in
wealthy suburbs, it's affected people in our inner cities, it's affected people in
rural America. At the same time, I wonder, is there do you
see from your vantage point a class dynamic to this at all? Is it
neutral at what does it look like from that perspective. I mean, I
think that we know that it's a phenomenon of affluent, white, highly educated
people. I think that's known. So I also know I know a couple
of teachers who teach high school in inner city areas. They say they're not
seeing that, They're not seeing people identifying as other things. So yeah,
I do think there's there's some of that. I mean, I don't know
for sure, but my observations would lead me to believe that this is a
very liberal, educated phenomenon. Yeah. No, I think that's very interesting.
It does strike me that there are among people who are engaged in,
for example, prostitution in urban centers, that there are It does seem like
there's been more transgenderism or sort of gender play, but I guess it's also
hard to tell if that's just how things are being described by the advocacy groups
and everyone in that space. Yeah, that's interesting. I think that one
thing that I have found by meeting people is that some of the what I
would call old school transsexuals who are game in who go into prostitution, they
don't believe they're literally women, and so there's an aspect of this ideology,
this liberal elite ideology, that's missing from their experience. So I think that's
notable. Well, maybe you can also speak to as somebody again, it's
it's in the description that I read earlier that is a huge one of the
questions about how drag has become has loomed so large over this entire conversation because
of it's sort of being marketed to kids in a weird way, in an
almost cartoonish way. That was something that originally thrived on this idea of the
sexual binary. There was something sort of underground and subversive about doing drags,
specifically because gender was not fluid, and that's been the impetus for a lot
of weirdness. It seems to me too, in the same way that you
know, as you were saying transsexuals who would never consider themselves are literally women.
That is completely different now and you can see that kind of arc very
neatly play out just on Rue Paul's show. It's just sort of been totally
flipped on its head. Yeah, I mean, I've noticed that there are
trans people who are mad about drag queens and other trans people who consider drag
queens a part of their culture their world. Yeah, there's definitely there's definitely
at least two sets of views going on under the transgender umbrella, one of
which is that gender is innate and you can have a gender identity that you
were born with, and that is kind of that old school world, right
like, and those people with that viewer largely game in. And then there's
this new idea that you can be non binary and that your gender can change
every other day, and that maybe your gender is you know, ELFs and
fairies and whatever, and that view really depends on not being innate and being
playful and being intentional and constructed and all that kind of stuff. So I
do see those two things playing out. I really feel like the latter one
is gaining all the popularity, So I don't know. Yeah, well,
and actually that's just as we're wrapping up. I was also curious to see
what your thoughts were. We're on the movement that has, in some really
remarkable ways blossomed to confront some of these big challenges, to resist some of
the mainstreaming of unhealthy, toxic ideas. You know, no movement is going
to be perfect and harmonious, you know, could you give us a little
bit of your perspective from kind of inside, uh, the group of people
who are pushing back on this, you know, are you guys optimistic?
Are you know, the auto gynophilia for example, as we talked about earlier,
there have been some flare ups at conferences and whatnot that get into some
of these interesting I guess internal disputes or conflicts or what have you. What
are you optimistic about the progress but the state of I guess the resistance to
all of this. Yeah, I have been really unsure whether it to be
optimistic or not. But I think the thing that you're alluding to is I
did go to the Ginspect conference in Denver this fall, and gin Inspect is
an organization that wants to find alternatives for people with gender dysphoria that are non
medical and wants to promote therapy and exploration and different ways of living and dealing
with dysphoria that don't amount to Okay, you said your trans or you feel
like a girl or a boy. Let's get you on puberty blockers right now.
Times of waste and you know, let's get you on some medication.
So that is what ginspect, that's what their view is. What happened that
you're alluding to is that a man showed up to INSPECT in address. He
admitted he was a man. He said he was not trans. He said
that he was an auto I file and that he had written a book about
it. Now, for this guy, his interest in this topic was that
he had found kind of found a way forward that didn't involve medicalization now,
I think, and I think that's why Ginspect also thought, well, this
is interesting. You know, we don't have a problem with this. Although
I was at the conference, nobody seemed to have a problem with it.
What happened later was that Inspect tweeted about it, and a huge number of
people had a problem with it. And so I think, just to try
to keep it brief, that what occurred was a split between people who are
against illiberalism, which I consider myself to be in that group, and people
who are against I don't know, transgenderism perhaps or against gender nonconformity or There
was a large contingent of radical feminists and gender critical peace won that group,
and so their primary concern was this man was doing something sexual, it was
offensive to women. That needs to stop. I think that, for one
thing, that that group didn't seem to be at the conference, so that
seemed to be a group of people who were talking without having seen what they
were talking about. But I also think that the way forward is with the
people who want to fight illiberalism, because I think that what's really going wrong
here, as someone with the background that I have, you know, someone
who stated women and gone to drag shows and all the things, what's going
wrong here is not that some men are wearing women's clothes. What's going wrong
is that they're lying about it. They're asking others to lie about it.
They're invading the privacy of people who don't want them present in locker rooms or
prisons. They're promoting some unscientific views about why they feel the way they do.
There's some myths going around about brain sex, and you know, some
ideas that it's in some way related to intersex, which it's not. And
so for me, if we just pursue liberalism, we will address these issues
without just being offended by particular people and what they happen to be up to.
So I'm optimistic. I do see a lot of community, especially on
substack, that's going in this direction of we don't like illiberalism, what can
we do about that? And I feel like that's a really good way forward
for this problem and all sorts of others, right, And I suppose there's
also a pretty good argument that it prevents the pendulum from swinging too far in
the other direction as well. You know, liberalism as the solution should at
least in theory, prevent you know, the I'm going to make a joke
that's going to offenderman catholically listeners, but the sort of Catholic integral integralist takeover
of you know, all of our institutions or you know, sort of things
that people are uncomfortable with that you know, for example, Ron DeSantis has
done, or anything like that. If they're making the argument that's a liberal,
I suppose that's that's also you know, kind of the comfortable safe space
to land on, because it should help the pendulum find its way back to
the middle. Yeah, I think it really would, because you know,
if we have free speech, then everyone can speak people on both sins,
people on all sides. You know, if we if we have a bit
of a live and let live, and you know, we try to to
have a hands off approach and just tell the truth. I do think that'll
bring us closer to the middle. Well, Shannon Thrace, this has been
fascinating. The book again is called eighteen Months, A Memoir of a Marriage
Lost to gender identity. Shannon Stubbs Substack is Shannon Thrace dot substack dot com.
Thraces T H R A C. E. Thank you so much for
coming on the show and for all of your work, Shannon, I appreciate
it so much. Oh, thank you so much. This has been a
really great conversation. Of course, I hope to do it again. Yeah,
I Emily just showed Ski Culture editor here at the Federal List. We'll
be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious
for the fray. I heard the Fame Boy the Reason, and then it
faded away.