 So in the last decade there's been a sudden explosion in teenage girls identifying as transgender. So my book explores why. Abigail Shryer's irreversible damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters, was one of last year's most celebrated and condemned books. It showed up in year-end lists of top books but was also banned by Target and her publisher was disallowed from buying ads on Amazon. Abigail Shryer's book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans wrote in American Civil Liberties Union attorney on Twitter. We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again. Shryer says she fully supports the rights of adults to undergo gender reassignment surgery. She's concerned that teenage girls are making irrevocable changes to their bodies that in coming years they might wish they could reverse. In a new paperback edition of Irreversible Damage, Shryer follows up on several of the women she spoke with and details her experiences of being deplatformed. Reason spoke with Shryer about the controversy over her book, the Streisand Effect and the future of free expression in an increasingly polarized cultural landscape. Abigail Shryer thanks for talking to reason. Thank you. Give me the elevator pitch for Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters. So in the last decade there's been a sudden explosion really in teenage girls identifying as transgender. We've never seen anything like this before. The underlying condition gender dysphoria or severe discomfort once biological sex is something we've known about for 100 years and it always predominantly afflicted boys and men. And now in the last decade it's overwhelmingly teenage girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria. So my book explores why, what's going on, why do so many young teenage girls suddenly decide that they want to leave womanhood and why are so many doctors and therapists and teachers helping them? So let's clarify a couple things. You say historically the kind of move to have gender dysphoria or the idea that you're born in the wrong body or you're uncomfortable in the body you're in. Typically that has been mostly men wanting to be women. Yes. Overwhelmingly. Do we know why that is or what do people say? Why is that? People have asked me that. I'm not sure that we do. There are some attempts to do brain scans and find neurological differences. But for whatever reason this did overwhelmingly afflict boys and men. And so I think they estimate 0.01% for men are naturally transgender. That's what the DSM-5 estimated. Which is the manual that talks about, I mean it's the psychological psychiatric god of things. That's right. The psychiatric manual, the DSM-5. And for women it was 0.003. So you're talking about tiny, tiny percentages, one in 30,000 women. So basically no one you would have gone to high school with. In the last decade now we have more than 2% of high school students. The recent, most recent surveys are even higher identifying as transgender and we know they're overwhelmingly teenage girls. So whenever you see, yeah. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, whenever you see something like that it's just worth asking why and that's what my book does. So when you say these are the overwhelmingly teenage girls and that it is, you know, they haven't presented this before. I have a good friend, a contributing editor at Reza Magazine, Georgia McCloskey who is transgender and who transitioned in her 50s or around the age of 50. And she talked about knowing from the beginning that she was a woman even though she was in a man's body. I mean, she played football in college, et cetera. But what you're talking about are girls who generally don't have, or the specific subset you're talking about are girls who don't have a history of always saying I want to be male. Yes, that's one of the peculiar sort of features of it is that the, this always began in early childhood for those who had it. It's a real condition. Right. And now it's teenage girls with no childhood history, meaning they were perfectly comfortable playing in princess dresses, never, you know, very often these girls liked, you know, ballet and all the sort of girly things. Right. And then they hit their teenage years and this is the other peculiar feature with their girlfriends, because it very often happens in peer groups decide that they're really transgender and they start clamoring for hormones and surgeries. And, you know, unfortunately today they're very, very easily obtaining them with almost no medical oversight. So let's talk a little bit about how the, you know, part of what you talk about in the book is a kind of contagion theory. And, you know, and I feel bad kind of demonizing teenage girls, but, you know, one of the examples that people always reach for is the crucible or the Salem witch trials where you have something that, you know, obviously it's not about gender, but where a bunch of teenage girls kind of all have a certain kind of common experience that oftentimes is considered kind of a social contagion. In a less enlightened time, it might have been called hysteria, but where people in a small group just get taken over with a similar feeling. Where, you know, where does the contagion come from? How does it operate? And, you know, what do we know about that? Right. So we know that girls, their modes of friendship are different from boys. Psychologists have studied this. I interviewed some from my book and we know that they tend to take on and share their friends' pain and they even take on and share their friends' reality even when they know it's not true. So for instance, if a young woman is, they like to rehash bad things that have happened to them and really share each other's pain. So if a young woman says, Oh God, I feel so fat, do you feel fat? The way that very often her friend would respond is, Oh, I feel so fat too. And it's that kind of thing that of course spreads anorexia among young women. They tend to want to agree with each other even when they know it's not true or right. And so they tend to spread these peer contagions. Belimia and anorexia are classic ones that tend to perseverate if you put young women together. And now we're seeing that gender dysphoria seems to behave in the same way. Young women deciding that their real problem is their boys trapped in girls' bodies and agreeing with each other and spreading this through friend groups. You talk about within a peer group, there's usually one or two who are kind of leaders, right, who kind of emerge with this feeling. And then I'm convinced isn't quite the right word, but they kind of, they're the starting point of this. Yes. So Lisa Littman did the, Dr. Lisa Littman did the research on this. And she showed that in friend groups, there was 70 times the prevalence rate. Now that's nothing we, among teenage girls, we, that's not something we'd ever seen before. What do you mean by 70% or 70 times the prevalence rate? Within friend groups, you would see 70 times the rate of trans identification of, you know, and, and claimed gender dysphoria. 70 times what you would see in the normal population of the, the, the incidents you would normally see in the normal, in a typical case. Now that was never true historically, right? Well, there have always been what we used to call transsexuals, and they weren't something that they were doing to agree with their friends. And, and that's why, you know, transgender, you know, or what we used to call transsexual people, they weren't in groups of friends that all identified as transsexual. They, you know, although they might, they, you know, after they recognize the condition they might seek out, I mean, this is a, and not to put too much of a kind of cliche on it, but that's, you realize that, and then you move, you know, I'm practically quoting Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, but like you, you understand something about yourself, and then you, you get to New York City where you can be, where you find your tribe. Right. So the, the reason that we didn't think this was true for the teenage girls. So that's a good point. The question is, well, how do you know that these girls aren't just finding each other because they all have the same condition? Well, the reason is, is these girls would suddenly come to this, they would have this epiphany within a very, very short period of time. So within a very short period of time, 50% of the friend group would suddenly decide they were transgender. Does it normally last? I mean, because this is also part of, you know, we've, we've talked in various other conversations where both parents are selves. And, you know, you never want to dismiss, you know, what your kid is saying when they come, when they come around with a new passion, but there's also, you know, parents almost automatically will be like, okay, that's great. And then let's give it a little bit of time. Right. So the problem here is that they, you know, it is what we used to call a hysteria. These girls become passionately convinced that this is their problem. Remember these girls, these girls typically are suffering from other mental health problems. They're in a lot of pain. They have very high rates of anxiety, depression and other comorbidities. They're in a lot of pain. They can become convinced by social media influencers and their friends that this is their problem. Teachers encourage this. They're being taught this in school that only they know their true gender. Then the moment they declare a transgender identity, everyone celebrates them everywhere they go. And they feel this enormous pressure to transition right now, to medically transition. And the real problem is there's no medical oversight. There's almost none. So they're able to obtain, you know, a process that used to take years and require medical, you know, oversight from a therapist to make sure this was a good, healthy decision. Now you just walk into a clinic and walk out that day with a course of testosterone. Well, let's talk about the steps that it takes to get, you know, a girl starts to identify as transgender. And in the book you walk through a number of case studies or people that you talk to about their parents as well as the kids themselves. And what, how do they, what do they encounter? You know, talk about the online experience of how that builds to a kind of certitude that what you're feeling is not just, you know, absolutely correct, but that there's a clock ticking that you really need to transition as quickly as possible. So there's, there's a lot of factors that go into this. And one of them is these girls are very lonely. We know that this is the loneliest generation on record. This is other psychologists work. It's not mine, but, but they have reported that it's the loneliest generation on record. They spend a lot less time in person with each other and a lot more time online. And they look to online older kids for advice about what, what they're feeling and how to understand what they're feeling. And there are a lot of very charismatic trans influencers who can't wait to advise them. They produce these incredibly, you know, they're very well produced videos, very watchable, and they convince young kids that if they feel uncomfortable in their bodies, it must be that they're transgender. And if they just start a course of testosterone, everything will get better. And the thing to know about testosterone is it does deliver euphoria and it does suppress anxiety. So the moment these kids go on it, they do feel better, and then they can't wait to tell all their friends how everything gets better when you start tea. So you, you mentioned before in the past, when, when this type of situation would arise, it took longer to kind of get, get through the various stages. You know, a girl, I mean, kind of the typical count in your book is that a girl starts to feel a particular way. She either talks with her friends who kind of sympathize with or, or they go online. And there are, you know, a whole kind of archipelago of, of support groups, of activist groups and whatnot. So then they, they kind of learn the language and they learn the general kind of ideological makeup of, of what's going on. How do they, how do they actually get things like puberty blockers and testosterone? Okay, so puberty blockers are typically require parents to go along with it typically. And they are, they are often a little younger than the girls I looked at. Because most of the girls I looked at were starting after, after they'd been through puberty. In fact, puberty is usually the crisis that brings on the thought that maybe I'm supposed to be a boy because they start hating their bodies around the time that they're going through these massive changes that every woman knows about that are really uncomfortable. They're really dramatic changes to your body. And this is when I mean, and I apologize for being kind of dumb about this, but I mean, that's, you know, puberty is the moment when boys and girls really separate physiologically as well. And the, the, you know, the effects on women are much more pronounced. They're much more pronounced. I mean, you go from inhabiting a body that's in many ways indistinguishable from a boy's in terms of strength and speed. And, you know, you know, your feeling of, you know, bravado in terms of what you can physically do to a body with a lot of vulnerabilities, a lot of pain, because, you know, the onset of mencies, it's, it can be really painful. And you're, and, and also you attract the attention of adult men for the first time, long before you're ready for it. So you'll start noticing men your father's age, looking at you sexually. And it's a very strange feeling. And a lot of girls and, and then today they have the added pressures of online pornography, which they, you know, the majority of them have seen, which is terrifying. And can I ask, I mean, you know, you know, going back 25 years or so when anorexia really kind of emerges as a topic of conversation, and it, it's always kind of interesting to think about how different generations or different eras have different kind of characteristics, psychological issues that come up, you know, whether it was hysteria in turn of the century, Vienna to something like anorexia, starting in the 70s and 80s. But one of the main readings of anorexia was that it was a way for women to forestall puberty or sexual, you know, sexual, sexual being, because when you stop eating, you, you stop menstruating, you lose your, your secondary sexual characteristics and things like that. Are you arguing that the kind of transgender identification as men or as male for teenage girls is kind of a way to cope with basically becoming sexually mature? I think it is. Yes. But I also think that these girls have less sexual experience. They are less likely to have kissed a boy or even held his hand than any previous generation. So they're really trapped in this body that has only negatives and they haven't even begun most of them to experience any of the pleasures of it. I talked to psychologists who have told me, adolescent psychologists who have told me that they're shocked by how few of these girls have ever masturbated because their bodies are, they're really tied to mom. They're very young, they're very sheltered compared to previous generations and they're inhabiting a body that seems to be going haywire. So it's not surprising that they would want to escape it. So, okay. So younger people would get puberty blockers. That generally requires, you know, parents going to a doctor or a therapist with the child. You're talking about people who are slightly older, they've gone through puberty and now they want to take testosterone because that's the, the kind of difference maker here. That's right. And puberty blockers are usually admitted in the administered in the very, very earliest stages of puberty. So sometimes puberty has begun, but you can't even tell because you're talking about Tanner, you know, one and two, these are very early stages of puberty. But by the time a girl starts developing breasts and her period, she's actually very far along in puberty, though she may only be 13 years old. And, and at that point they would go, you know, the pressure is to go straight to puberty, sorry, testosterone, because puberty is already, it can't be blocked anymore. And depending on the age of medical consent, and it varies by state in Oregon, you can walk into a clinic and walk out that day at 15 years old without even a therapist note or your parents permission. So who is giving them the drugs? I mean, are testosterone, is testosterone governed? Is it, I mean, do you need a doctor's prescription? How do you get it and in what form? So you do need a prescription, but, but often it's not coming from a doctor. You can, you can go see a physician's assistant and clinics we've gone from, I think there were two clinics or one in 2007, one clinic in 2007, a few years later, there were two, now there are over 300. So you're, you're seeing this burgeoning of clinics, Kaiser gives it out, Planned Parenthood gives it out. And it's very easy to find one and go in. And frankly, at the public schools, the teachers, the activists, the online, you know, online influencers can't wait to tell you how to, how to get testosterone. So they can't wait to coach these young kids on, on starting their new big change. What happens to a teenage girl who takes testosterone, you know, and is it apart from, you know, any questions about, you know, whether this is psychologically good or bad, what are, what are the physical results? And is there a problem there? So everybody's obviously hormones are a little different. And so it has different effects on, you know, but, but in general, you tend to get a five o'clock shadow that may never go away. You're, you tend to broaden it redistributes fat, which girls really like, because they start, you know, when you go through puberty, you start getting fat in areas that, that bother you. And, and it, it will redistribute them. It gives you a euphoria, it gives you a feeling of empowerment, so you become socially bolder. But you also, of course, end up with a really different physique, it can change your private anatomy. The young woman's clitoris will typically get larger and may even approach the size of like a tiny penis, it sort of looks like a baby carrot. And, and, you know, and, you know, their voice will change that, that tends to be permanent. At that point, do they become more sexually active? You know, and by that, I don't necessarily mean with another partner, but you, you mentioned that a lot of the girls who start this procedure don't masturbate or they don't really have a physical pleasure to their body. Does that come with testosterone as well? So they do tend to have more sexual desire with testosterone. The problem is once they start messing with their bodies, by, by giving themselves these big changes, they often will wear a binder, which is a breast compression garment, it flattens the breast. They, they actually aren't loving their body and they don't tend to want to undress in front of another person. So you don't see them being, you know, very often you don't see them being sexual. And this is something I've confirmed by talking to people in the, you know, trans community who have said to me, you know, I once said to one, does this seem like a cult of asexuality to you? And he's, and, you know, I interviewed Buck Angel, who's, you know, a porn star, who's trans, really a mentor to a lot of trans youths. And he said, yes, I mean, these kids are not, are not sexually active very often. Does that speak to the idea, though, that, you know, because this is something that an earlier generation of trans people talked a lot about that sexual desire and kind of gender identity are separate. You know, that, you know, who, what you feel like, what sex you feel like or what gender you feel like is an independent variable from what kind of who you desire or whether or not you want to have sex. I think it's true, that's true. But I think what's going on with these girls is when you're changing your body so radically all the time, you're not, you're not necessarily so comfortable sharing it with someone else. So for instance, you know, mass double mastectomy, which these girls often go on to, it can be quite grisly. I mean, you know, it often takes several follow up surgeries to correct, you know, nipple placement, they lose sensation in the nipples, which, you know, is a sexual sensation. They lose that very often. I mean, it depends. But once you start going on this path, you're, you may feel a euphoria from the testosterone, certainly at first you do, but, but they don't, they don't tend to be in a position of being ready to, you know, undress for another person. When you, you said some go on to, you know, having what's called top surgery. I mean, basically getting rid of female breasts and, and sometimes using musculature or in any case, you know, kind of achieving male breasts. I mean, so you don't need a binding garment anymore. What, what's the percentage of, you know, of girls who, who transition and then actually have top surgery, you know, by the, I don't know, by the time they're 21 or something like that, are there good numbers on that? I would have to look up, you know, I heard recently that there are, you know, I heard a number quoted of how many girls are on waiting lists for top surgery. It was enormously high, but I haven't verified that yet. But you see, if you check GoFundMe, you know, I think there was in the tens of thousands of girls raising money for this surgery, top surgery is a very popular surgery. We know that between 2016 and 2017, the number of young women, biological women undergoing gender surgery quadrupled. So there's a great interest in it. And, you know, a large percentage of these girls go on to get top surgery, especially because the breast compression garment often deforms breast tissue. But what they don't get is bottom surgery, very small percentages of them go on to get bottom surgery, which is probably that's the falloplasty. That's probably a good thing. It can be a very, you know, a surgery that can go awry in all kinds of ways. And this is something in the current discourse about trans gender identity and whatnot that seems different than I'm old enough to remember the 1970s when, you know, people like Renee Richards, who has had been a doctor, a male dentist, and then became a professional woman's tennis player. There was a lot of emphasis in the 70s on kind of the surgery and the kind of mechanics of changing gender. That seems to be much less emphasized today. Well, yes, you know, they're always saying anyone can be trans, it's how you feel. I mean, that's part of the sort of the activism around it that you can feel one way. They say you can be gender fluid, feel one way, one day. It's all a matter of feeling, essentially. Yeah, that's very much the gender ideology, which goes along with a real condition, gender dysphoria is a real condition, the activism around it and the ideology around it. There you're really getting into some witchcraft and honestly, a fairly incoherent set of ideas. What is your best understanding of where the activism comes from or what is enabling it? And again, we're not talking about for adults. We're talking about for teenage kids, for kids generally who are minors, under the age of 21 or 18, depending on the state. Where is that coming from? And then talk a little bit about how in the book, you talk a lot about how social media and other new forms of kind of conversation help enable it, but where is that initial kind of impulse coming from? So I think gender ideology is a really good parallel to critical race theory, because we've always had transsexual individuals and they were not revolutionaries and they were not angry and they were not looking to transition everyone and they weren't looking to frighten women by marching into their protective spaces or domestic violence shelters. There were very people who were able to have good jobs, productive lives, good friends and they weren't trying to intimidate everyone, but the activists have taken up this cause in their name and they do not represent the wonderful transgender people I've interviewed or come to know, but they have taken up their cause in their name and they are quite aggressive. They are the ones who make all the incursions into free speech and try to stamp out any suggestion that you should ever halt medical transition and it really is a kind of capture by these very aggressive minority of activists. What, and I guess for the record, could you, I mean you are not against transgender people, you're not against transgender surgery or transition surgery for adults, correct? Yeah, not only am I not against it, I will say that I've interviewed a lot of transgender adults and this is an incredibly, you know, major change to go through the physical change of undergoing gender surgery and it used to be obtained after, in conjunction with mental health care and therapy and I've always found that when I interview transgender adults, they are some of not only the kindest but most thoughtful people I have known. They really are, you know, they made this big change in their lives so they have a lot of interest. It's as fundamental a change as one could imagine. Right, I mean it's a big deal to go through and they sort of have this, you know, wisdom that comes with it. They really, I cannot express stress this enough, they couldn't be more different from these crazed activists who somehow have a great hobby of threatening me and whatever else, anybody else who dares to question immediate medical transition for troubled teenagers. What is the con, what is the connection between trans activism and existing gay and lesbian or LGBT, well I guess LGB activist and whatnot because this is also something that you see increasingly people who have been very active in the fight for equal equality under the law for lesbians and gays, bisexual, transsexual people are often at loggerheads now or it seems like there's a rift between some of the more hardcore activists that you write about and the kind of establishment of sexual orientation or sexual liberationists from a previous era. That's right, I mean to remember they're very, very different populations and they were looking for different things that I'm talking about traditional gay people or even transsexual people from the activists. For one thing, gay people just wanted to be accepted as what they are. Transgender activists demand that you accept for them for what they are not, meaning you have to say I'm a woman because I've decided I'm a woman. This is the demand of the activists, it's not the demand of most transsexuals I've talked to, but it is the demand who are very sober, they don't deny who they were, but it is the demand of the activists and I think a lot of gay adults went along with, they saw this as a very vulnerable population and they didn't want to speak out as these radical activists started getting going with their, a lot of really extreme demands. What are some of the most extreme demands and you're telling? Well just the idea that you, they have tried to remove my book from libraries, they call me a threat or a danger which is bizarre. Everything from you must, I mean people are kicked off Twitter for saying anything for not agreeing with the statement a trans woman is a woman. That every woman's feminist organization now puts out these little policy statements, trans women are women is quite absurd, trans women obviously are trans women. Other people have made this point, you know that's just true, they are trans women but they, you know what we call trans women but they're not women, they have different biology from women and there's nothing wrong with that. And you're not at any point, you never suggest that they should be accorded different you know kind of different legal standing or anything like that. No, I mean I fully support you know full civil rights for transgender people of course. The only question is I think that a real discussion needs to be had before we consider all you know transgender women or biological males who say they're women exactly equivalent to biological women under the law meaning before they flood women's prisons we need to have an open conversation about how to keep women safe from biological men who are convicted felons and have undergone no surgery I mean that's just a conversation that needs to be had and the activists find the even possibility of that conversation intolerable. Do you, I mean would you grant and again you know your book it's funny because if you approach this book having read about it depending on you know who's reviews or whose glosses you've read you'll either be like well this is a breath of fresh air and it's you know it's a reality grounded discussion of something that particularly parents will understand or your history is greatest monster since Jimmy Carter. You can understand though why a trans person might be like you are denying who I am or you're denying my reality. Would you agree with that? No I don't think I am at all because I actually think these girls have misdiagnosed themselves. They aren't like trans you know trans what we used to call transsexuals and we now call transgender adults at all. They are very troubled teenage girls and their their claimed gender dysphoria is obviously atypical. It doesn't have the features of typical gender dysphoria. They don't have a childhood history of it. They demand testosterone and top surgery immediately they talk about they fixate on it and by the way detransitioners young women who went through this and then detransition talk about this. They say I was so fixated on the idea that if I just transition I you know it felt so urgent I need to get testosterone right now I can't wait another day that's what they say. This is not how transgender people talk about their transition at all. They're much more sober about it. They're much more calm. It's simply what they have come to you know as as an adult after a period of trying to resist this they they decide you know that's how I'm most comfortable but it's not hysterical. It's not the fevered urgency that these girls seem and it's not done with girlfriends with the celebration of their peers in school. It's really done after a period of you know sober contemplation often with a therapist. Let's talk about you know in the the paperback version of the book you've updated a number of aspects you've added material. Let's talk about the reception or actually not the reception of the book but you experienced and you've alluded to it at various times there were campaigns to kick you off of Amazon target which was selling the book for a while took it off its catalog or whatever online sales. What was what what was going on with your book you know what was your experience in terms of being deep platformed at various places? It's really it's really been wild so the most extreme activists they see the book selling well and that it's you know broadly liked a very good Amazon reviews and whatnot and they decide to flex their muscles and their one Twitter user complained to Target and said this book's transphobic you need to get rid of it and unfortunately American companies today have no spine if they hear that kind of complaint they immediately say okay we don't want to be transphobic and they deleted it. They deleted my book there was public eye outcry they put it back and then they quietly deleted it again. I was actually contacted by a target employee who was extremely upset about this who sent me some of the internal communications and there were constantly going back and forth people were saying within the company there's nothing transphobic about saying that teenage girls should have medical oversight and some gatekeeping before they immediately start a schedule you know a schedule to controlled substance and um and you know there's nothing transphobic about that but today everyone just immediately bends to the extreme activists and even though activists are saying something almost no one believes I mean you know I have gotten an outpouring of support most of it quiet to my inbox but from across the political spectrum people saying hi I'm a you know far left on the political spectrum but I just read your book and frankly I agree with all of it. What are you on target now are you being sold at target? No they never brought it back they took it off again. What about what about at Amazon you are it's available on Amazon. Yeah what was your experience at Amazon? Well first of all Amazon you know they refuse to allow ads for the book they refuse my pop publisher the opportunity to sponsor ads for the book so they they played various games but Amazon had a committee read the book searching for transphobia and they have this glamazon you know committee that was that that was demanding that it be removed and they had a full they appointed a full committee to read every page of the book and they found that there was nothing transphobic in it. And Amazon more recently in response to a couple of inquiries by republican senators or conservative senators talking about the book when Harry became Sally which they did deplatform they said that they Amazon issued a statement saying that they were not going to carry books that talked about transgender identity as a psychological you know malady but your book is up there and running. It's up there and running I mean I don't you know I you know what was done to Ryan's book you know that's Ryan Anderson's book I think is awful. But there are distinctions between yours and his. Yes I mean my book's not political I didn't really look at the politics of this movement and I didn't look at it really isn't about policy or a particular political perspective it's just about a medical mystery I really did a journalistic investigation of what's going on with when teenage girls suddenly decide together that they're transgender and and why are so many adults pushing this or how why is it so easy for them to get these really serious you know controlled substances and whatnot so so that's what it looked at I don't diagnose the transgender identity as you know I never do that I don't think it's a medical condition and as for gender dysphoria well that's you know that's in the DSM um so the DSM considers you know the the psychiatric manual considers that a mental health disorder but but do I think um you know I have you know do I think it's a disorder well in this in the sense that you know I have met transgender adults who are living very productive very good lives I certainly don't think it's it's something that inhibits that um so you know I don't know I mean your book is not transphobic no it's not I mean it shouldn't be banned on by amazon's own statement right I think it's more this is what I how I understand the activists that they they are very much testing the the waters they are very much pushing the limits and they want to see what they can get you know how much they can shove people around and they have picked this issue in part because the other side is so reasonable um and if they can insist that you say that trans women are women if they can win on that they can make you say anything well but there I mean are you saying that okay well you know so trans activists are going to march from that issue to a bunch of other things or I mean or is it just a trans activists you know really believe what they believe and they're going to push within that kind of subject area as far as they can so yeah and by the activists I don't mean transgender people but the the activists these gender ideologues will they move on I don't think they have a big plan except chaos I think they really are trying to disrupt the family I think they really are trying to disrupt American life and I do think they are looking to recruit revolutionaries very much the way Black Lives Matter operates what do you mean can you extend that a little bit sure um well I think that when you when you object to the term mother okay oh we have to get rid of the term mother that it can only be you know gestational parent you're you're really you're you're you're pushing demands so irrational um and so frankly anti-family because of course no one becomes a parent hoping to become a gestational carrier they do it because they want to become a mom or a dad um and and this is just a really way of making family and the goal of family you know far less attractive they are clearly have their sights set I think on America and American life they really want to disrupt as much as they can and they are they are absolutely assaulting free speech they say that we have to change our vocabulary everywhere and that is the I am a she they you know these are my pronouns she they I'm just going to see if you can do that I mean you know I'm a good English speaker but you know like many people would find it very confusing and very hard to use she they pronouns with someone I I have to admit and I say this with the authority limited as it may be of a phd in English I don't worry too much about pronouns um because you know we end up talking people know what you mean and who you're talking about but can I ask then you know there's an irony though if you're saying like today's trans activists are are kind of working to undermine the family and in a way that puts them at odds with radical feminists of yesteryear who oftentimes were explicitly anti-family they thought the the family was a site of patriarchal repression and whatnot but now you have and this seems more pronounced in England for reasons I'm not exactly clear but you have an older generation of radical feminists the germane greers of the world who are very much at odds with today's trans activists right I mean I think that in a time when gay people and lesbians had less rights less ability to have their own families I think they did have some umbridge understandably at the family structure and now that they've been so included in you know marriage and family life you know my book has broad lesbian support for instance um lesbians are very concerned that young women who might naturally just become lesbians are instead dramatically changing their bodies and denying that they're women and that they're going to regret it I mean that's that's why I wrote the book I think if these girls were going on to lead happy lives it would not have written the book I don't care I would not yeah how how do you know or I mean and in the book you talk a little bit about in follow-ups with some of some of the particular people who talked about but in broad statistical terms is the is there good data to say that girls who go through transition or go on to um you know testosterone or having top surgery you know before the age of 18 or 21 are they more or less likely to feel good when they're 30 or or is it too soon to even be able to understand you know where that might end up it's a little soon but but I will tell you what we do know okay the thousands and thousands of of detransitioners young women who say they regret it are already populating youtube every week it's unbelievable how many women will have come forward and say there was a big case of this in England curia bell sued the tavastok gender clinic in England young women are coming forward more and more all the time and remember there's a very new treatment it didn't used to be the young woman could get these surgeries so now that they are we're finally seeing and in this population of young women who have regretted this is exploding we know that there's a lot of regret already but there are ones who are like no no this actually it's worked out well say it again are there yeah I mean but there are also women who are like now this was a good choice absolutely um there are what you know there are ones I think first of all most of the regret is yet to come because this is fairly new but are there you know certainly there are many transgender adult adults I've talked to who seem very happy in it um and are there going to be teenagers who do I mean I've talked to adolescents who seem you know who transition to adolescents are now in their mid 20s and they're still happy with it I absolutely talked to them the problem is of course is that there's absolutely no medical adequate medical oversight so no one is making any attempt to separate the girls who are you know young women who are likely to be happy with this from those who are very highly likely to regret it and suffering from a lot of other comorbidities and would it be accurate to say I mean one of the things that you're basically arguing is that you know instead of rushing into conversion therapy um it's you know you're saying like stretch it out a few years to see if this is actually a a long-lived condition as opposed to a you know a kind of phase that might resolve itself either in a in a in a girl becoming you know heterosexual or lesbian down the road a little bit right I mean there there's no differential diagnosis given today the standard every medical organization has adopted is every medical accrediting organization is affirmative care so the doctors are all rep we're stamping this the problem is a lot of these girls are just going through angst I mean really serious they have anxiety and depression but I you know I've interviewed a lot of them I've interviewed a lot of their parents and already we're seeing young women come forward and say wow I can't believe I thought gender was my problem I had a lot of other things no one wanted to talk about to go back to the question of speech you raise an interesting question and I think a lot of people would totally agree with the idea that activists certainly in the trans space and and particularly about adolescent girl transitioners you know they seem to be attacking anybody who disagrees with them or anybody who challenges anything and that's an attempt to kind of suppress speech whether it's done you know through kind of legal means or through kind of change in cultural mores what about amazon or targets free speech rights you're a lawyer by training right and does you know does amazon and in their statement to you know republic to explaining themselves to senator republic a bunch of senator republican senators they said you know what we have a right to decide what we're going to carry on our platform and you know as a libertarian I am a massively in favor of all free speech I think you know I want more free speech always I think twitter you know and facebook they restrict too much speech in the name of you know whatever their terms of service are but fundamentally does amazon have a right to say you know what we're going to carry this book we're not going to carry this book okay so I want to I'm going to address that but first I just want to correct one tiny thing and that is the activists are not teenage girls right oh yeah yeah right our biological men yeah um they are shutting up speech about the condition afflicting teenage girls okay and they're overwhelmingly biological men um so do I think amazon has a right to choose what it wants to carry or target well a few things of course it chose it was carrying my book they chose that and then they and then activists complained and then they decided activists have decided what other adults are allowed to read but there's also a problem when you're that market dominant when you have that larger market share the problem is the reality is with amazon today that books that amazon does not carry or that activists can strip from amazon will never get published in the first place you can't take a chance on an author that might be deleted by amazon as a publisher you can't take a chance as an agent on an author that might be deleted okay so you will start to see these not getting published at all that's what that's the difference between the local bookshop saying hey we just sell marxist books this book isn't for us an amazon which controls most books that are published do you think and you know and it's interesting to phrase it in that way because i know kind of smaller publishing houses or smaller authors where that seems very likely to happen in a way you've had and you're published by regnery which is a major press it's conservative but it you know it's got great distribution it's got a great marketing arm both in terms of direct sales as well as being carried everywhere is there's something of a stress hand effect where you actually and i don't want to say you you know you relish this but where you're the the tribulations that you went through in terms of this being on amazon being kicked off being on target being kicked off actually may have given you more publicity so in some cases you know this actually is kind of a decent outcome for you so here's what i will say um did i sell more books because of the controversy absolutely but an author doesn't i mean at least i am not principally concerned about that why because they could delete my book at any time they could delete anyone's book at any time okay whatever i make from the you know book sales you have to look against a free a society that could delete me as an author tomorrow an amazon that could make my book vanish tomorrow and that by the way you're literally you know like i mean it is true that with kindles you know this is something that is you know i both i love it because it's a it's a fantastic technology and an elastin to carry you know literally hundreds of books in you know a page you know in a very thin lightweight device but literally they could zap your kindle library overnight because they own it you don't exactly and think about it this way i don't think they will do that but i mean this is i'm interested in you know in you're talking about here more broadly about a kind of culture of free speech rather than whether or not i mean because you would agree amazon has a legal right to basically do whatever it wants well you know i don't know when you're when you're that market dominant i think that really you're affecting the speech that adults can read so i'm not sure you do have the same legal rights when you're that huge i think we certainly disagree about that but i hear where you're coming from okay i mean i think scale matters if amazon let's say amazon controlled 90 of the book sold should it be able to well that that's effectively you know eliminating books from every american library i'm not sure that that should be allowed you're giving the supreme court which is going to be hearing cases about this you know very you know in the in the near future i'm sure you're giving them material to think about with that for sure i think we have to but the bigger the bigger issue is i don't want to live in an america that decides what adults are allowed to read that's a really dark and ugly place it really is and i don't think that they will stop with me or my book or ryan anders i think they will keep going i mean i think that's very alarming now my book happened to you look i you know i wrote i was you know i wrote it very intentionally and i you know certainly i'm not transphobic at all i mean i fully support medical transition and civil rights for transgender people but um i'm alarmed i'm really alarmed by a society that would go around digitally deleting books um and you don't think that you know say a regulatory uh and related people would come up with an alternative or a parallel distribution network that would allow that because i you know and again i want to come back i realized you you you do not identify as libertarian but this is you know it's an interesting dilemma for for libertarians i think in particular because we believe in absolute you know maximum free speech rights but also maximum property rights right and the and the idea that you would compel speech on any level to say well you've you know because you have a big market share because you've been very successful you have to carry everything even if you don't want to that you know you you can appreciate that dilemma well i can the problem is that you know i i think scale matters right so i think that you know you're talking about a tiny group of minorities who are calling the shots for what the american public could read the point of the book is it uncovered a medical scandal about whether these girls are getting appropriate medical care and oversight that's a debate that must happen and even if i'm proven wrong which i don't think i am i think i'm right but even if i were ultimately proven wrong the idea that you can delete and silence you know a legitimate investigation is really troubling to me um i you know i don't think every book should you know that you should be able to demand that every bookshop carry every book but i do i do think that there's something very different going on today and i'll tell you what what you know i don't think our laws are prepared to have to deal with what we've got i mean just to give one example defamation law is almost impossible it is almost a possible in america to sue for defamation right today and win okay the problem is it's never been easier to defame someone on a mass scale you can defame someone and put out all kinds of lies about them and have millions of people read that with no recourse this isn't some guy distributing flyers these are permanent flyers that never leave the internet that are distributed to millions of people to me it's very obvious that our our defamation laws were not prepared for that do you feel though that defamation you know is a good example where because it's so much easier to defame people people are less likely to buy you know a defamation charge i the you the you know as it becomes easier to spread you know comments about people the bar for people to really believe that or you know act on it gets raised i think that's true but gosh that really we're really you know assuming a system that that is has integrity in america so we're assuming a system in which our newspapers then don't repeat those lies we're assuming a you know a judicial system that has integrity that doesn't take those lies as evidence of anything i'm i'm very concerned about institutional corruption in america today and i don't think mass publication on the internet of lies is is something that no one needs to worry about um well what's the best way to uh to push back against that because again like we don't want we don't want to become even more litigious right where everybody is suing everybody all the time about this or that and i guess you would talk more broadly and i'm very much in sympathy with this of a you know we should have a culture of free expression and of open expression and open debate in in in the public sphere um what are the ways that we might get back towards that where instead of trying you know we live in an age of cancel culture where people are constantly trying to just shut down whole areas of debate what are the ways that we kind of open things up you know i i'm really with you on the radical free expression i really don't think we should put these companies in the business of deleting people's um speech especially when you cannot trust the mean the ways they will do it and i think that adults should be able to hear you know all kinds of theories about what's going on and decide for themselves what they want to believe um and and i don't like the fact that these big tech companies can put their fingers on the scale their thumbs on the scale and affect you know the debate by silencing one side right so what um but in terms of a larger culture of of kind of open expression um you know are there things we can do beyond because i mean you know i i suspect that you would agree that you know the only thing scarier than facebook deciding what is or isn't misinformation or disinformation is you know the people in washington right or bureaucrats but they're working together now they're working together now because you have a situation in which what's getting um censored happens to be the stuff critical that the administration doesn't like the narratives that don't look good for the administration that's what's so alarming it's not that these not only that these companies are making these decisions but that it's it's it's you know something favor the the administration is in perfect alignment right now with that censorship that's that to me is extremely troubling but then what do you do i mean do you know audrey lord uh said that you can't dismantle the master's house with master's tools can you stop uh you know can you stop the censorship you know by government with more censorship by government or you know how does where do we go from here i think that once these you know companies become large enough and open themselves up and become basically public squares they cannot censor what goes on it okay um and i hate speech and that yeah that is i we definitely uh don't agree on that but i appreciate the uh you know the logic that you take to get there what happens uh next for um for you and for your book where um you know what do you have a follow-up plan or what um what what do you hope to achieve with the i guess with the release of the paperback oh um you know i you know looking forward to more people you know getting a chance to to read it i think you know the reception's been very good it's very reasonable and it's very eye-opening i think parents need to know um what what all the ways that their decisions as parents are being undermined right now how little say they actually have and how much power we've shifted to teenagers even to cause themselves you know harm um in all kinds of ways they're very likely to regret one of the uh you know one of the interesting subtexts of the book are not quite a subtext but a thread throughout is that um you know it is simultaneously the best time ever to be a woman and to be a girl to be growing up now and it is also incredibly daunting can you talk a little bit about that paradox where um you know it's you know it's the best of times and in some ways that makes it much more difficult growing up to become a woman i think it's a really hard time to be a woman in a lot of ways not not because of material opportunity we've never had so much material opportunity more girls of course are are going to college and getting graduate degrees and and whatnot but um there there are a few things that make it really hard to be a young woman um first of all online porn um it sounds tame it sounds like oh just playboy on your on your computer but actually these young girls at very young ages um you know i think the the average age at which young kids first see um pornography is somewhere between eight and eleven it's very young um there's they're seeing women choked within an inch of their life during sex this scares the heck out of girls and they tell their therapist that that they find the idea of sex really frightening um and young men watch this and then think they that is the kind of you know sexual life and young men are also having less sex than you know those of us of earlier generation less less enlightened generations much less they're high having much higher rates of sexual dysfunction we've never seen so much erectile dysfunction um in in this population of men who used to be able to you know that was one thing we could count on them for is you know sexual desire and ability to sexually reform and right now they're struggling um and and they've linked this to porn um so there are a lot of scary things about being a young woman i think that that a lot of young women were scared by things narratives spun by the me too movement i think they the ideas that ever you know one in four women is sexually assaulted on campus is a really scary way to go off to college um it's not true and and it's a you don't want to go to go to college thinking you're gonna be one in four of you will be raped um so i i think that a lot of things are really scary for young women today even though they they do have material opportunity oh there's there's also just the idea they'll be attacked for their privilege by their peers they'll be told that um no matter what they've gone through no matter what they've personally overcome you're a white girl and you're privileged and nothing you say counts um so i think there are a lot of ways that young women are being beaten up on are you are you optimistic about the future in general for you know either american society or for you know today's teen girls well i don't know if i'm optimistic i i think that this problem the problem i talk about i think that will get turned around um i think look we're in a period of of uh you know unusual chaos i think um and i i i do hope i mean i think this country is worth very much worth saving and gosh you know here's my take i'm not a very political person um um the book as you mentioned has a conservative publisher in in england the identical book has a non-consort you know a non-conservative publisher so um i'm not a terribly political person um i i'll tell you what i care about today i care about things like free speech i care about equal protection i care about due process i care about the rule of law and i think they're all being threatened right now and that's what i care about and i don't you know various issues of various parties are not something that interests me terribly uh we're going to leave it there uh we've been talking with abigail schreyer the author of irreversible damage the transgender craze seducing our daughters abby thanks for talking thank you