Gender Pressure

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I have a number of different, very good pieces of
journalism in front of me. I'm just going to touch
on a couple very briefly and then get into the
guts of this thing. The first is a piece written
by a fellow by the name of Jonathan Route, who
was a gay man, who's who has a very close
friend who is a trans woman, and they are discussing

(00:21):
the modern state of extremist transgender activism. Um and and
this trans woman who the article doesn't reveal that she
is until after she says these things, but I thought
you should know in advance. Uh. She thinks trans women
are different from women born as women and should be
called trans women, not women. The distinctions, she says, is

(00:43):
important in fields were sex matters like medicine, and also
recognizes the unique challenges of being transgender. I want discrimination
in the sense of making precise distinctions the trans women
or women things drives to be batty. Beyond the biological silliness.
It suggests that being trans somehow isn't legit. It's a four.
I'm a erature. I don't get to say on trans

(01:03):
and uh. The gender ideologues who claim to speak for
transgender equality do not speak for her quote. I lament
that a small number of activists appear to want to
use these issues in service of a larger social and
political agenda. Their fight is not my fight. I do
not wish to be a tool of revolutionaries or a
target for reactionaries, and I detest their wish to tear
the fabric of Western liberalism to shreds. Interesting, it is

(01:28):
interesting that is a courageous and intelligent person who understands
what's happening. A lot of these divisions and and radical
stances are meant to divide society, children from parents, and
and meant to usher in a different revolution. Then there's
this article, this piece that I found incredibly interesting and moving.

(01:51):
It's by um a young person, a young woman who
goes into a great description, a long description of her
childhood and adolescence, full of depression and anxiety, alienation, eating disorders,
generally being a very very unhappy young person. And she

(02:15):
like a lot of people who answer that description, and
and older folks, you can't relate to this. The younger
people are gonna be nodding their heads. She ended up
spending a tremendous amount of time on Tumbler, which is a,
it's a communications platform online. There's too many of those, Yeah,
too many of those, and um, and she talks about

(02:36):
how it became a surrogate UH friend group, support circle,
that sort of thing. Major aspect of tumbler culture, she writes,
has always been social justice ideology, things that are now
being played out and witnessed by the general public on
platforms like Twitter and TikTok um, like you know, everything
from demisexuals. Then she used a bunch of terms I've

(02:58):
never heard in my demi sexual I like, because that's
the one of I only have sex with people that
I have an affection for, I have a relationship with,
which is what they used to call normal normal. But
everything you see, like dissociative identity disorder, Larper's neo pronouns,
other kin and everything you see on lives of TikTok

(03:18):
has long existed on tumbler dot com. The oppression hierarchy
of racial and gender identities now being written in the
law and many of our once serious nations. UH was
the state religion of the People's Republican Tumbler long before
your political junkie uncle knew the term CRT as cultish
religions tend to operate open devotion to the religion is mandatory.

(03:40):
Um uh. Perhaps the outsiders most likely to understand the
way social dynamics work on that website would be survivors
of scientology, for instance. On Tumbler, the situation was such
that any claim to being oppressed would accumulate social credibility,
while any unfortunate privilege status was justification for verbal abuse.

(04:00):
As a privileged person, you were expected constantly grovel and apologize.
You had no rate right to speak on any issue
involving the group you were oppressing. You could not object
in any way to any mistreatment hurld against you because
of your race, gender, or sexuality. I found myself in
a bit of a double bind. On one hand, I
had found what felt like to be the perfect group
of friends who understood me on intuitive level, who I

(04:22):
was able to talk to you openly about the things
I liked and made me weird in real life. But
on the other hand, I was assis hat white girl
in an environment where that was one of the worst
things to be. Cis had, That's what I am. Since
Tumbler users are mostly biological females, the cis had white
girl holds the position of most privileged and therefore most
inherently bad group. In this climate, you're made to feel

(04:45):
guilty and responsible for all the horrors and atrocities in
the world. You can try to make me feel guilty,
but it's not gonna get you very far. Well, right exactly,
But this is a confused and unhappy adolescent girl, right, okay,
getting hammered and hammered and hammered about how she and
people like her are the source of all evil in

(05:05):
the world. God, it's it's it's interesting. I realize this
is a tangent. But if you're not on that particular
social media thing, you know, it's a tree fallen in
the forest. How about you just hang out somewhere else, right,
Stop hanging out where people treat you like that. Yeah,
absolutely true, although again she said this was a group

(05:28):
that seemed to understand her and her weirdness, and having
coached three children through adolescents in the teen years through
college into adulthood, UM, adult, especially confident adult males, it's
very difficult to to picture that. Um. But then she
goes into it's understandable that any young person exposed to

(05:48):
this kind of belief system would grow to deeply resent
being white, cis straight, or biologically male. The beauty of
gender ideology is it provides a way to game this
system so that you can get some of those targets
off your back and enjoy the camaraderie of like minded youths.
You can't change your race, pretending to have a different
sexuality would be very uncomfortable in practice, but you can

(06:10):
absolutely change your gender, and it's as easy as putting
a she they in your bio. Instantly, you're transformed from
an oppressing, entitled, evil, bigoted, selfish, disgusting, cishad white scum
into a valid transperson who deserves celebration and special coddling
to make up for the marginalization and oppression you supposedly

(06:32):
now face. Now not expected to do as much groveling
and reaffirming to everyone how much you love checking your privilege,
you can relax a little and talk about your life
without wondering if you're distracting from the struggles are speaking
over marginalized groups because you're marginalized too. To summarize it,
and you're already there, they go from hated to affirmed.

(06:53):
This is the incentive I felt to comb through my
thoughts and memories for things that might be further evidence
that deep down, I wasn't really a girl. I hate
did my body It must be because I didn't. I
don't like that. It's female boys have never been interested
in me like they are with other girls. Well, maybe
I would be attractive as a boy, and then I
could have be like all these cute gay trans boys
I saw dating each other online. And and she goes

(07:14):
into a fair amount of detail on this, and I
haven't even gotten into the main point. There's so much
of this the main point, okay um. And she gets
into some of the problems of being an adolescent girl
in the modern world, with the pornography and girls being
sexualized in the rest of it. And she was afraid
of becoming a woman, like all adolescent girls are. They're

(07:41):
thrilled by the prospect. You see him wanting to wear
makeup and and you know, the provocative clothing way before
they ought to. They're thrilled by it and simultaneously terrified
by it. And a lot of girls with all of
this social stuff going on, opt that Wait a minute,
I'm not a girl at all, that's the answer. I'm
not a girl at all. And whether they're actually you know,

(08:03):
tomboys or lesbians or whatever, they're driven towards this other answer.
And I hope that's illustrated a little bit of what's
going on in their heads. And and if we can
take a quick break, I want to come back with
a piece that miraculously was posted in the Washington Post
by a woman who's a software developer in Indianapolis. The

(08:26):
title is what I Wish I'd known when I was
nineteen and had sex reassignment surgery. The fact that this
is in the Washington Post speaks to the fact that
sanity has clawed its way back up the hill of
public conversation, having been kicked down to the bottom by

(08:46):
the lunatic radicals, and people are starting to talk sense again. Yeah,
that's a good point. A story from a young woman who,
in the midst of the most troubled moments of her adolescence,
was embraced and whisked along by the it's great to
be transgender community and ended up becoming something she wasn't
at all. She did not surgically transition, thank god. She
woke up at one point and realized, look, I'm just

(09:09):
not comfortable in my own skin. Um, I'm not comfortable
with my sexuality, I'm not comfortable with being a grown woman.
I need to work through these things. And then you
come to this uh piece written by Corina Khan, who's
a software developer in Indianapolis, and and shockingly, this piece
is published in the Washington Post today. It is entitled

(09:31):
the website is Frozen. No, it's entitled as it unfreezes
what I wished I'd known when I was nineteen and
had sex reassignment surgery. You know, I'm gonna pose a
question going into this, give you a kind of framework.
What if there was a controversial medical treatment, an irreversible

(09:52):
surgical measure occasionally used on children and adolescents, but still
there very controversial, and every hospital in America had to
decide who makes the decision on whether we're going to
do this procedure, And every hospital in America came up

(10:14):
with the same answer, Let's find a confused adolescent to
make the decision. Can you imagine that if it was
heart surgery or brain surgery or any surgery on Earth,
you're gonna ask a confused adolescent. But wait, it's worse
than that. How about a confused adolescent a child who
is being harangued by radical activists. They're going to be

(10:38):
in charge of deciding who gets an irreversible surgical procedure done.
There's your framework now, the words of Cornicon. When I
was nineteen, I had sex. I had surgery for sex reassignment,
or what is now called gender affirmation surgery. The callow
young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood could
not have imagined reaching middle aged. But now I'm closer

(11:00):
to fifty, keeping a watchful eye on my four o
one K and dieting and exercising, and the hope that
I'll have a healthy retirement in terms of my priorities
and interests today, that that younger incarnation of myself might
as well have been a different person. And yet that
was the person who committed me to a lifetime set
apart by my peers and from my peers. There is
much debate today about transgender treatment, especially for young people.

(11:21):
Others might feel differently about their choices, but I know
now that I wasn't old enough to make that decision.
Given the strong cultural forces today casting a benign light
on these matters, I thought it might be helpful for
young people and their parents to hear what I wish
I had known. I once believed that I would be
more successful finding love as a woman than as a man,
But in truth, few straight men are interested in having

(11:42):
a physical relationship with a person who was born the
same sex as them. In high school, when I experienced
crushes on my male classmates, I believe that the only
way those feelings could be requited was if I altered
my body. It turned out that several of those crushes
were also gay. If I had confessed my interest, what
might have developed. Also, the rampant homophobia in my school
during the age crisis smothered any such notions. Today, I've

(12:04):
assigned myself to never finding a partner. It's tough to admit,
but it's the healthiest thing I can do. As a teenager,
I was repelled by the thought of having biological children,
but in my vision of the adult future, imagine marrying
a man and adopting a child. Uh. She points out
that that just absolutely didn't happen. Regrets it terribly. The
sacrifices I'm made seemed irrelevant to the teenager. I was

(12:25):
someone with gendered this for you, yes, but also anxiety
and depression. As always, the most severe cause of dread
came from my own body. I was not prepared for puberty,
not for the strong sexual drive typical for my age
and sex. Surgery unshackled me from my body's urges, but
the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage.
From the day of my surgery, I became a medical

(12:46):
patient and will remain one for the rest of my life.
I must choose between the risks of taking exogenous estrogen,
which include venus thrombo embolism and stroke, or the risk
of taking nothing, which includes degeneration of bone health. In
either case, my risk of dementia is higher, a side
effect of issuing testosterone. What was I seeking for my
sacrifice a feeling of wholeness and perfection. I was still

(13:08):
a virgin when I went in for surgery. I mistakenly
believed that this made my choice more serious and authentic.
I chose irreversible change before I had even begun to
understand my sexuality. The surgeon deemed my operation a good outcome,
but intercourse never worked, never pleasurable. Where where my parents
all this? I'll skip to the end or out of time.

(13:29):
I shudder to think how distorting today's social media is
for confused teenagers. I'm also alarmed by how readily authority
figures facilitate transition um long story, short weight. If it's
right for you, do it, but do it later. Wait wait,
wait