 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating puberty blockers and we're starting right now with Amy's opening statement. Thanks for being with us, Amy, the floor is all yours. Thank you so very much. Welcome everyone to should transgender children be allowed to take puberty blockers. My name is Amy Newman and I'm a comedian, skeptic and counter-apologist who also happens to be a politically incorrect tranny. What I mean by that is I'm simply a transgender person who speaks their mind without a filter. Now, in my experience, the best thing to do when someone screams please save the women and children is to make sure your wallet isn't missing. However, with our debit cards securely in hand we can move on to the topic. Should transgender children be allowed to take puberty blockers? Well, that depends. In fact, I would say like most ethical questions the answer is situational. First of all, I think we can all agree young children should not be on puberty blockers. We're dealing with adolescents who are still very much children but are dealing with some form of mental anguish. The example many transgender activists use is feeling like you're trapped in the wrong body. That's not quite right, but in some form or another the change is happening to our body seem devastating to how we see ourselves on the inside. For many transgender individuals, this pain started back as some of the earliest memories that we have. In fact, it's a common story I've heard from others. Many of us knew from an early age and many of our parents knew from an early age who we really were. Let's eliminate another group. I think some people fear crazy mother trying to push their gender critical stuff on their children. I haven't seen much evidence of these women and mass existing but if they exist, then sure, I can condemn them. The entire goal here is not about what we want as parents. The goal is what is healthiest for the child. And if we come into tonight's debate with that in mind, then I think it'll be a productive conversation. Now, what about the effects of puberty blockers? Aren't these children making dramatic life-faltering decisions? Well, all pills have side effects but the ones for puberty blockers are fairly minor. Furthermore, puberty blockers are completely reversible, meaning that a child who decides to transition or that this was just a phase can simply stop taking the blockers. Their body will naturally begin to put in the proper chemicals. Finally, what about your tax dollars? I have lukewarm feelings on that subject and I'm not asking for your tax dollars. In fact, my premise is simple. Adults with gender dysphoric adolescence should be able to work with their doctor to prescribe them puberty blockers. This isn't exactly a time for celebration. In this scenario, a child who's having gender problems is pleading with their parents for help. And the parents are doing what they can with the advice of their doctors. The goal is that we just don't want dead kids. This isn't a subject anyone should take lightly. Nonetheless, a moderate common sense and scientific approach to this subject is possible. Thank you. Thank you very much for that opening statement from Amy and want to let you know folks, if it's your first time here at moderate debate, we are a neutral platform hosting debates on science, religion, and politics. And we hope you feel welcome no matter what walk of life you were from. Gay, straight, Christian, atheist, politically left, politically right, you name it, we're glad you're here. And with that, we're going to kick it over to Rob for his opening statement. Thanks for being with us, Rob. The floor is all yours. Thank you, Amy. Thank you, James, for having this debate. I think it'll be a good debate. I agree with Amy in one sense that this is about the health of the children. That's absolutely right. Pardon my interruption, Rob. It is just, your audio is a bit low. I've got you cranked. It's how you can get it over here if you're able to turn it up just a bit. Let me see, let me see what I can do. Is that better? That is better. Sorry, it switched to my default mic. So I just said, thanks, Amy. Thanks, James, for having me here. I think it'll be a good debate. So one area I do agree with Amy on is that it is about the children's health. That's where our primary focus should be and oftentimes these debates become something that's geared more into feelings and into what adults think about the politicking of it. And that's not really the place for this. We should be focused on the health of the children and that's exactly why I'm against having puberty brokers for transgender and gender dysphoric children. The impetus, when we look at the framework in the debate, this is how we have to focus. It's not on me to prove that these sort of things can be harmful to children. It's on Amy and the people advocating for these sort of kind of experimental drugs and things like that, that we don't have a large body of scientific evidence on. It's up to them to prove that these are necessary interventions. So just look at this in a broad sense. Even if we're talking about adults, we don't chemically alter people's makeup unless we know that it is necessary in the best course of action medically to do so. That's doubly true of children because children, unlike adults, don't have the ability to formulate ideas that would be best for themselves in the future or the ability to consent to many things. That's why uniquely when it comes to children and doing things like giving pharmacological interventions that would block puberty and things like that, the impetus is on those suggesting that that is the correct course of action to prove scientifically that that is necessary, that there won't be negative side effects and that it would be beneficial. And sadly for Amy and her side of the position, that is not what the science bears out. So despite the fact that there is a large institutional push and a cultural push for trans children and things like that and all of these sorts of puberty blockers for gendered as for children, the reality is credible scientists that have looked into this in scientific bodies in health systems that were constantly told, especially by progressives that are better than the United States health system have continually found that there is not evidence to suggest that these drugs are effective or are safe for children. For example, the UK has now made it illegal to prescribe puberty blockers to children under the age of 16. One of those prominent hospitals in Sweden, a healthcare system that we're told that we should emulate has also done credible research and looked at many, many studies and found that they too will not prescribe puberty blockers to children under 16 and say that it should only be done in an experimental way with many permissions from different bodies of scientists and even then probably shouldn't be done. What this is tantamount to because we don't have long-term longitudinal studies is experimenting on children. What we can see is the majority of children that experience gender dysphoria, the most favorable numbers from steelmanning the position coming from transgender institutions, such as, I'll get to the name of it here in a second, I lost the name of it, but they suggest that as low as 73% of all children that experience gender dysphoria grow out of it without any pharmacological interventions whatsoever. That means if we're giving puberty blockers to children, there's a good chance that at least three fourths of them and some of the studies show it's as high as 95% of children that experience gender dysphoria grow out of it without any interventions. That means that we're giving long-term effects to children, most of which are just going through a phase that would grow out of it. She says that there's not long-term effects. That's not true. Studies show that there are issues with pituitary glands. There's issues with bone density. There's been over 24,000 credible claims according to the CDC of side effects from the most common puberty blocker drug that's been given. Some of those include people saying that their hips feel like they're on fire. Some of them is long-term reproductive organ failure and things like that. These are serious complications. Not to mention there are psychological effects that come from this. No doubt Amy will talk about people at studies that have said, which aren't really studies, their surveys, that have said that the majority of children that get on puberty blockers stay on those puberty blockers the rest of their life. Well, that's true because we're depriving them of puberty. And despite that, I think that we should treat trans people particularly all trans people, but especially trans adults should be allowed to see whatever interventions or medications they want and any negative treatment of them because of their condition is deplorable. It's no doubt a difficult life. And the science backs up that there's a lot of mental health issues. There's a lot of physical health issues that come with people that are transitioning. If 73 to 95% of children grow out of gender dysphoria without pharmacological interventions, what sort of future are we dooming them to by giving them puberty blockers which almost always then relays into them taking puberty transition therapy, which is not reversible. So all in all, the impetus is on the pro side to argue that there is scientific credibility as to why we should do this. The greatest scientific bodies in the country are in the world have said that that's not the case and that it would be tantamount to experimentation on children. Children are not old enough to make these life altering decisions. And we need to think of the children first and understand if they go through puberty, we still have many, many technologies that they could transition after puberty and have successful lives as many adult trans people could tell you. And I'm sure Amy knows that that there are many trans adults that have gone through transition, have gone through therapies that didn't start that when they were children and they're perfectly happy and doing great now. So that's the end of my closing statement. Thank you very much, Rob, for that opening and wanna let you know folks, we are absolutely thrilled. If you have not noticed on the bottom right of your screen, we have an upcoming event this Friday that is honestly going to be epic. You don't wanna miss it, a four-person panel discussing questions such as what is or isn't transphobia as well as should critical race theory be taught in schools? That is going to be epic. So hit that subscribe button if you haven't already as you don't wanna miss it this Friday. And so with that, we're gonna jump into open conversation. Thanks, Amy and Rob, the floor is all yours. I just wanted to start, and thank you so very much, Rob, for joining me in this debate. I wanted to know where that study comes from, where you're saying 75%. So according, and you could disagree with that, what I try to do my, I try to do my best to look at evidence from a steelman position. So from the position of the trans community and trans activists and the sources they use. And the best source I could find that was constantly cited comes from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. So I actually have a link to their most recent document it's a series seven of recommendations they give. I can send that link to you where would be the easiest place to send you links through the Zoom chat? Yeah. So just through the Zoom chat so I'll send that through the Zoom chat. And then we'll go down to page 11 if you don't mind. So let me know when you have that. Well, it's funny that you bring this up. I was actually going to bring this article up because this is one of the articles cited when you go on to a bunch of the medical pages for why transgender youth is one of the primary care options. Right. That's exactly why I chose it. So what I'm doing is I went through their study and picked out reasons that I picked up the numbers and the data they use and I'm using that along with other studies to show why giving puberty balkers to children is bad. So for example, the question we're talking about if you go to page 11 and you'll see that it says differences between children and adolescents with gender dysphoria. I'll just read a portion of it here. An important difference between gender dysphoric children and adolescents is in the proportion from whom dysphoria persists into adulthood. Gender dysphoria during childhood does not inevitably continue into adulthood. Rather in follow-up studies of pre-puberty children, mainly boys, who referred to clinics for assessment of gender dysphoria, the dysphoria persists into adulthood for only six to 23% of the children. That means their range is... Am I reading? Because I see, in contrast, the persistence of gender dysphoria in adults appear to be much higher for adolescents. No formless, respective studies exist. However, in a follow-up study of 70 adolescents, is that where... So the paragraph before, that's what I read. You're reading the next paragraph? Sure. Because it looks like so the ones who were taking the puberty blockers who are all diagnosed with gender dysphoria transition. Okay. So let me discuss what's going on here. The first is, you'll notice that the first section talks about actual studies, varying studies, and the range that they've given is anywhere from 94% to 73% of all children that experience gender dysphoria grow out of it without any medical intervention whatsoever, without any pharmacological intervention. That is definitive. The second part of it talks about adolescents, and what that number is, that 70 number, when it happens is they gave a survey of tens of thousands of trans people. Give me one second. Just share screen. Okay, while you're sharing the screen, if you don't mind, if I could explain what's going on here. What that was was actually a survey. And this survey, which we'll get to, I could bring up that survey as well. It interviewed tens of thousands of trans people, and of those, they found 70 that ads children had puberty blockers, and all 70 of them remained on puberty blockers after they were given to them as children. That doesn't prove that adolescents are not experiencing gender dysphoria and going back on it. What it proves is, unlike a scientific study, they did a survey where they were unable to even prove that the people, it was just literally a survey, like you would be called on the phone. Did you experience gender dysphoria? Yes. Did you take puberty blockers as a child? 70 of the tens of thousands said, yes, I did. Did you stay on those puberty blockers? Yes. So that's not a scientific- Just real quick. Sure. Okay. You could go or I could go. It's up to you. Well, it just seems like you're critiquing surveys. This seems like I've heard this type of, if you don't mind, but it seems like a conservative critique of survey. Why should we accept surveys over scientific longitudinal studies? That's a false dichotomy. Why should we accept the scientific accuracy of people doing surveys and studies and try to gather data? So if you'll allow me to continue. So one, we can see that this was a survey of merely 70 people that said they continue. Let's, despite the fact that surveys should not be preferable, let's look and assume that both of these two things are true at the same time. So we'll take out the fact that one of them's a survey. Let's just say both of these are true. So it's true that 94% to 73% of all children that experience gender dysphoria grow out of it without pharmacological interventions. And it's also true that 70 people that were on puberty blockers continued to remain on puberty blockers throughout their adulthood. Both of those things could be simultaneously true. So there's two possibilities for why this would be the case. The first possibility is doctors are incredibly accurate at predicting, even though the majority of children with gender dysphoria will grow out of it, they're incredibly accurate at predicting which of those won't grow out of it without pharmacological interventions. And those are the only people they're giving puberty blockers to, that seems to be incredibly dubious. Or the second option is, when you give someone a puberty blocker, you affect them psychologically, they never go through puberty, therefore they never feel the need to go back to their sex assigned puberty or their sex assigned gender, right? If you never went through puberty, how would you know that you want to go through puberty? So if you have all these- If it eliminates- If it eliminates the pain that they're going through, they're going through pains of going through puberty and they're going to their parents and they're saying, in fact, I mean, what would you do if you had, and actually the age is an important question because in my mind, we are talking 12 through 16. Like that is the age range that I'm talking to. So when you said like the UK is allowing 16 year olds, I mean, in my mind, that means they're half allowing children. I mean, that's just- That's absurd. So for example, if you read the WPATH study- I mean, unless you're in Alabama. If you read the WPATH study that we're agreeing, you agreed that was a good study or a brief book to look at. They talk about puberty blockers coming in. That's just how they identify stages of puberty. They call it TANR. So there's TANR one through four. They say TANR two is the area where they recommend allowing to start puberty blockers. That on average is eight year olds for girls and 10 year olds for boys, right? And so this is just, right now we're currently looking at the information and literature that it's given from the trans-activist community, from medical professionals that are recommending that we give puberty blockers. Even their literature says as many as low as, anywhere from 96% to 73% of all children that experience gender dysphoria grow out of it without puberty blockers. Why would we have doctors giving children puberty blockers daily? When they're giving these children puberty blockers, most of them would have grown out of it without needing it. But what happens is they give them these puberty blockers and then it negatively affects the rest of their life. It affects them psychologically. It affects them so they then refuse to go back or they don't know if they ever wanted to go back to their sex assigned gender at birth. And so that, I'd also like to comment on that. The side effects generally speaking of puberty blockers are very minor. You were talking about things like bone density and stuff. That stuff is true, but you can also take calcium. You could also take, no matter what a pill, there's always going to be a side effect. But as far as side effects go, puberty blockers have extremely minor side effects. And if someone decides this is a phase, they want to detransition, this is something that they can stop taking. I'm against surgery for children and things like that. This is just basically children are coming and by children. I mean, puberty adolescents who don't classify children, whatever you want to call it, who are in pain, who are saying, the other thing is, sure. If I can interject, if you don't mind, okay. So again, so let's just start with where we're at. So we can see that many of the people that are getting puberty blockers, it was unnecessary for them to have them. Now, if you go back to my opening statement, the impotence, well, that's what the science says. Do you disagree with the WPATH science that says 73 to 96% of children grow out of gender dysphoria without drugs? Is that what it said in there? Because I didn't see that paragraph. Allow me to read that. Sure, allow me to reread then. Quote. 73 to 90%. Follow-up studies of pre-puberty children, mainly boys who were referred to clinics for the assessment of gender dysphoria. The dysphoria persisted into adulthood for only six to 23% of the children. That means 94% to 77% of children grew out of it without pharmacological intervention. That's what literally the literature from the most prominent organization in the defense of trans rights is. So we're giving these puberty blockers to a lot of children that's affecting the rest of their life. It affects them psychologically and physically, the rest of their life. So again, the second part of that is, well, most of the people we give puberty blockers to, they never then stop taking the puberty blockers. Well, that's not an argument for puberty blockers. That's an argument as to how puberty blockers change the course of their life. And when we see the serious problems, both psychologically and physically that could occur in disproportion with the trans community, putting someone into that community that would have grown out of it isn't a healthy thing. These children aren't old enough to make that decision. We'll get to just real quick and I promise I'll leave you respond. The second thing is what you're trying to say is, well, they're in pain and this helps them. Says who? So according to the study that I linked, which was longitudinal studies, I believe 13 studies that the UK health body looked at when they ultimately led to a court decision to not allow puberty blockers, all of those studies that they compiled, the best longitudinal studies they could find said that there was basically no statistical variance for why puberty blockers helped mentally with pain any more than traditional therapy helped. And there were negative consequences, albeit slight, such as problems with bone density, pituitary problems and things like that. So the truth is there is no credible evidence that this is solving any sort of pain. In reality, what you're doing is causing psychological interventions that could last a lifetime and potential health side effects to treat something that almost everyone was going to grow out of anyways. You made a lot of claims there. I would like to know where you evidence that people, especially transgender individuals going through this aren't suffering through pain. I wanna know if you have any medical organization that backs not going on to puberty blockers or transitioning. Is it just like a lot of them detransitioned? Therefore, we shouldn't do it because I knew that many detransitioned and that is the point of going on puberty blockers because it is reversible. No, so the organization, so for example, the NICE, let me get what the accuracy means and I have this written down somewhere, so. It's the National Institute, let me see. I presented the link for you, but basically the body, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the UK, this was the body that was tasked with compiling all of this research to determine whether or not puberty blockers should be allowed to children. So this is literally the governmental health agencies in the UK that did all of these studies, which I linked these to you. You could look at their methodology, there were dozens of studies they looked at and they were able to conclude that there's not enough research, they have a low confidence in the studies that were conducted, but these studies show things like there weren't significant increases in mental health, there weren't significant increases in other forms of physical health or anything like that from puberty blockers. What you're seeing is it turns out that if we treat people that are just children that are experiencing gender dysphoria through things like being caring and understanding of them and having therapy, that has just as much of a positive influence as the hormone blockers. The problem is all of the studies that talk about hormone blockers being effective also are people that, it's not like they just took the hormone blockers and weren't getting therapy. So when they did control groups of gender dysphoric children that were receiving hormone blockers and getting therapy and they weighed that against the control group of people that were not getting the hormone blockers but were just getting the therapy, there was no mental health benefit whatsoever that they were able to find from the hormone blockers. However, the same study, again, the governmental body of the UK found that there were albeit low confidence, there were issues of pituitary glands and effectiveness and bone density effectiveness. Now you'll say, but wait a minute, they say that they're low confidence in that, exactly. But that's why I framed the debate as I did. It's incumbent on the people offering these puberty blockers to prove that they're scientific literature, that they're effective. Otherwise it's tantamount to experimenting on children. So even, so what this study is saying basically is it's inhumane to give these people, this is the courts of the UK have came to the conclusion based on the health system of the UK concluding, there's just not enough evidence that these puberty blockers are safe or effective and therefore it would be in effect experimenting on children to give them to them. That's not Alabama, that's not Arkansas. And I could post evidence that Finland's done the same. So have hospitals in Sweden that are considered some of the primary health facilities? The example you use, they are allowing children to have hormones. So I don't know if that's a good one, but I mean, I asked if you had basically any scientific examples to where they thought this was detrimental to children. And generally speaking, the mainstream scientific answer is that no, it's not detrimental to children. And yes, it is positively affects them. So I don't understand. Right, you could say that, but I'm providing actual evidence that you could present if you want, I could screen share it. I would like to see some of that. So I put it in the chat, right? So it's in the chat. So this is from the Institute, again, this is from the National Institute of Health and Care Excellent in the UK. So let's go through like just... Let's go through their conclusions. It was an upload of a PDF. Correct. But I don't think it uploaded. This was the actual document. And then this document was instrumental in the UK courts decision to strike down allowing puberty blockers to occur in children. I'll just read from the conclusion if you like. Conclusion. The results of the studies that reported impact on critical outcomes of gender dysphoria, mental health, depression, anger and anxiety, and the important outcomes of body image and psychological social impact, global and psychosocial functioning in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria of very low certainty using modified grade. Grade is the system they use to determine whether or not a longitudinal study in these studies have outcomes that we can trust. They suggest little change with the hormone blocking analogs from baseline to follow up. Studies have found difference in outcomes that could represent changes that are either of questionable clinical value or the studies themselves are not reliable and changes could be due to confounding bias or chance. You could, I could read the rest of the conclusion if you want, but that's them saying like... I wanna see the document. I posted it. Is the PDF not loaded? No. Okay. What I could do then is post the link that I got the PDF from. That'd be awesome. In fact, Rob, someone had mentioned they would love to get a chance to look at that link. If you're able to throw it into the modern day debate live chat, otherwise I can look in our Zoom chat and throw it into the... Yeah. I'm concerned with my internet quality. If I open up your YouTube video... No worries. I got it. So what I could do is... Can I screen share? You can screen share. Absolutely. So the green button that says share in the bottom center, there you go. Is that working? All right. So let's go up to the top here so people could see exactly what I'm talking about. Evidence review. Donata Trophin, that's the puberty blocker. They call it GNRH. Releasing hormone analogs for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria. This document with the help of Dr. Hillary Cass independent review and the gender identity services for children and young people was commissioned by the NHS England in improvement and who commissioned the Cass review. It aims to assess evidence for the clinical effectiveness, safety and cost effectiveness of this releasing hormone analogs for children. So let's get onto the conclusions which is where I was at. The results of the studies that reported impact on the critical outcomes of gender dysphoria and mental health and the important outcomes of body image and psychosocial impact in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria are a very low certainty using the modified grade. This suggests little change in the GNRH analogs from baseline to follow-up studies that found differences in outcomes could represent changes that are either of questionable clinical value or the studies themselves are not reliable and changes could be due to confounding bias or chance. It's plausible, however, the lack of differences in scores from baseline to follow-up and the effect of the analogs in children and adolescents with gender dysphoria in whom the development of second sectional characteristics might be expected to be associated with increased impact when dysphoria, depression, anxiety, anger and distress over the treatment. And it goes on to say basically that there's just no cost effectiveness evidence was found to determine whether or not that it's good for children. The results of the studies that reported outcomes for subgroups of children to adolescents suggests there may be differences in sex assigned to birth. So this, and if you don't mind, I could switch it over here. Did that switch for you all? You all can see. This is from Reuters. UK court rules against trans clinic over treatment of children. Children aged under 16 will need court approval in England and Wales to access puberty blockers after a landmark ruling on Tuesday. Three high court judges said it was highly unlikely that a child of 13 or under was competent to give consent to puberty blockers. And it was doubtful that 14 and 15 year olds could weigh the long-term risk. Following the ruling, the national health services in England updated its guidelines to state the court order must be sought. So again, this was the study that was commissioned. I'll stop screen sharing now. How do I do it? And that is what I wanna talk about. So you have a 15 or 16 year old that comes to you. They are losing, they're having a receding hairline already with all that, just like I did at 16 and 17. They're having all this terrible stuff that would cost thousands of dollars for them to assimilate and become a normal human being. They're having suicidal attempts. They are telling you that I want to be my own self. I wanna be, I want the inside to match the outside. At what point do you just say, let the damage be done? And as soon as, you know, two, three, four years, let's hope you make it that long. What do you do as a parent? Okay, so here's the problem. That is not how medical interventions and how doctors should approach things. They shouldn't say, well, I just agree with your diagnosis, with the patient's diagnosis, and therefore I just give in to what you want, even if the scientific literature does not show that these interventions will be positive for you on average, right? So what you're saying is, well, be damned. You asked me to provide evidence. I did, I could provide more. I could provide, for example, hospitals in Sweden. The finished document that I have, it's not in English, so good luck reading it, but I tried to get some translations of it. But all of these documents looked at all of these studies over and over again and found that there were no medical benefits to giving these hormone block. At best, what you could give, it's purely cosmetic, right? So the idea for hormone blocks would be this. You would say, oh, this 12 year old is eventually wants to go through gender transition surgery, or they may want to, therefore we should block their puberty now so that they don't show as getting the pubescental signs of going through puberty, right? That's the argument. And so you're saying, well, their hair is falling out and things like that. But one, if there were possible long-term side effects, which some of the studies suggest there may be, we wouldn't just for cosmetic reasons do that, particularly when the psychological interventions that we have, such as therapy, show just as much, if not more success than the puberty blockers in the first place. And secondly, right. So explain to me what positive effect puberty blockers have on children. What positive effects. So generally speaking, the longer you transition, the harder it is to assimilate back into Western society. The more you have to try, why? Because you are normalized, because you are raised in it because you don't have to go through all the masculine, even though we're focusing on male to female, it could go the other way. But it is easier to not have your hairline fixed than to go in and spend $50,000, $60,000 trying to fix it. It is, you are raised from a child, into an adult as the gender you are, you are going to act more like the gender that you were supposed to be. You're not going to act weird, or at least you're going to act less weird. These are the people that generally don't get made fun of, that don't only get teased and all this stuff, they're the ones who transition early. The people who get teased and can't assimilate and all this, or have a harder time struggling, the older you are. And that's why I want to know what you would do. What would you do if your kid was coming to you? Would you just say suck it up until you're 18? No, who said that? I wouldn't offer experimental drugs that could have negative impacts for the rest of their life. I would be a loving parent. I would do everything I could. I would ask a doctor to help me. I would seek psychological help, not saying that even that it's, because it's a psychological illness, because anyone who's going through a difficult time, like that needs to talk to a therapist. I would do those things. I would be as loving as parent as possible. That doesn't, let me ask you this, like giving your, you already said that you're against the surgery. So if your 13 year old comes to you and says, I want the hormones and I want the surgery, are you going to be a callous parent and say, no, you're not allowed to have the surgery? At that point, you need to take the situation for what it is and go, first of all, no, they don't need surgery at 13. You need to ask them what's going on and you need to grade how much pain they're in. For another good point, I want to take away that maybe even the conservatives will agree on. You know, I want to filter out if there are other issues besides being transgender. If something else is making them depressed or sad, I want to filter them out. I literally only want the people who need this to be on it. And I'm not happy. Like I don't, I'm not this gender critical. Like I don't want to push being feminine on kids and hey, everyone, it's basically, I'm just saying in the situation where the parents are pushed up to the wall, they're getting advice from the doctor. I mean, that almost all, yes, all comes together. So again, remember how we started this debate? We both agreed that it is actually for the health of the children, not politics, not for the feelings of the parent, et cetera. So I kind of questioned then the direction you're going here because you're saying, but wouldn't you just say to hell with it and give in with what they want? Well, that's not necessarily doing what's best for the health of the child. And it's evident by the fact that you have a visceral reaction to the idea that a 12 year old might want gender reassignment surgery. At that point, you say no. And the reason you're saying no is because you know that the benefits that could come with that surgery don't outweigh the consequences of the long-term ramifications of having that surgery. The same is true of hormone therapy and puberty blocking therapy. Again, I'm the only one that's actually presenting actual studies that compiled many studies and said that they came to the conclusion that they feel it would be experimental because there's not enough scientific evidence and it's of very low quality to suggest that there's even minimal effects on the mental health of people that go through these hormone blocking surgeries and will get to the possible risks here in a minute. But the other thing I want to say here is you say, well, you know, they're in pain, we would do. Again, that's the problem. Just because someone says they're in pain, that doesn't mean you give them whatever they say. For example, we don't do this with any other intervention. So if I go in and I say, doctor, my arm's in pain, I want fentanyl. The doctor's not gonna be like, well, we have to give you what you want. They're gonna say, we have studied this and we know what's up. And we have organizations that have studied and did research to determine what are the situations that warrant this? The most credible people that have investigated this like in the UK, Sweden, Finland and elsewhere have determined that it is a net risk to give these puberty blockers an actuality. You have just as many positive impacts for just doing things like therapy. If you do the therapy until someone 16, 17 or whatever the age of adulthood is in your country and then they decide they want hormone therapy and stuff, fine. But again, when you say, oh, here's the point I wanted to say. I don't know what you're getting at when you say, it almost sounds like you're making a really, really dangerous argument here when you're saying, well, the longer you live and go through puberty, the less likely you are to want to transition. Well, why is that a bad thing? Why do we want people to transition if they lived out their natural life and grow out of it? Which again, 93 to 73% of children do grow out of it without pharmacological interventions. So when you say, oh, it becomes more difficult to assimilate into society. Well, there's only two possibilities. Either one, you're talking mentally and that's because once you hit puberty it actually changes the thoughts you're having and most people grow out of gender dysphoria. Or second, it's because of the way you look, which is what I said. And I'm sorry, yeah, it might cost a lot of money to physically alter your looks, to identify is the gender that you want when you're an adult. But that's not a reason to experiment on children just because it'll be more difficult to change their looks later. The experiment on children. I don't think anyone has experimented on children. It is right now. The medical back scientific approach that if you talk with your psychiatrist with that if they find that you have gender dysphoria that they will prescribe this. And I also don't think we're giving in. Once again, it's not about giving in. It's not like, oh boy, my girl, my boy wants to be a girl. We should just try hard. It's now you have to take them to the doctor. You have to figure out what's going wrong. Is it something else? Is it just a phase that something got into or do they have real underlying problems? And once again, there's a major difference between surgery and puberty blockers. In fact, I would say the middle ground is the actual hormone. We're not even giving them testosterone or estrogen. The entire point is just to block the hormones so that they have the chance to say, you know what, I want to transition. I'm going to go and do this. Or I don't want to transition. And I'm just going to be like I was and it was a phase. But I still don't know, what would you do? I mean, it does sound like you're telling me that you would counsel your kid. Is there any scenario that you were 16? That you were, I mean, 16 was UK. Anywhere from 12 to 16. Is there any way that you, any scenario that you would allow your child to go on puberty blockers? No, not currently because the medical literature. If you let me explain. You keep saying that the medical literature is on your side. Can you show me a source? I mean, you were quoting one of the sources. Sure. I'm going back up to give me one second. Because the sum of those three sources that you pulled up. Give me one second. Now again, I've given the most comprehensive recent study that was taken apart or that was done by the National Health Institute of the UK that looked at dozens of studies, compiled those studies and came to the best conclusion. This was then echoed by Sweden, which later came to the same conclusion in their healthcare system. But you're going to cite studies from like 2011. Many of those studies were actually. Those studies were from like 1987. I hate to say this, but this is like a creationist thing where it's like a quote from a quote from a quote where it's like, if you asked those doctors, if your conclusion was the same as their conclusion, I do not think that it would be so. So I'm going to share this again. You said all these studies from years ago. This is again, the same source that I showed. Executive summary of the review. Nine observational studies were included in the evidence review. Five studies were retrospective observational studies. Baird 2020, Joseph 2019, Kirsten 2014, Clank 2015, Viot 2017, and then there were prospective longitudinal observational studies from Costa 2015, Debraze 2011, Shagen 2016, Stratford's in 2015. Can you provide me more current studies that you think depict a more accurate depiction than all of these studies combined? Yes, I can. This is giving me a second to bring up some stutter. So while we're going, one second, just doing a quick intermission. As I did not mention, I usually mentioned earlier, I want to let you know folks, our guests are linked in the description. We appreciate our guests very much. And so if you've been listening tonight and you've been enjoying what you've been hearing, oh, what are you waiting for? You can click on those links in the description and hear more from both of our guests. And also a friendly reminder, folks, that as always, we want to encourage you in the chat as well as in the comments after the discussion, attack the arguments instead of the person. Very important. And so with that, we'll kick back into the open dialogue. And so I'll just bring this back to the sum of where you got those three articles. Transgender youth and children and adolescents who are not identified with the sex they were assigned at birth. Because transgender youth are usually dependent on their parents for care, shelter, financial support and other needs. Transgender youth face different challenges compared to adults. Professional medical associations state that appropriate care may include supportive mental care, social transition and puberty blockers, which delay puberty and the development of secondary sex characteristics to give children time to make decisions about more permanent courses of action. Can you post the link to that? Sure. And what you'll notice is that's just- It's the three links. One of the links came from one of the ones that you were using. Just post the link, that's all. You'll notice that this isn't a study that's cried the efficacy of whether or not that was effective or not. It's just recommendations given by doctors. So we have a study compiled in 2021. Right, we have a study compiled in 2021 that looked at the best studies that we had available. And it determined that there were no positive effects that could be found for puberty blockers on children. The same effects that could be attained through therapy were what people were citing as positives for puberty blockers. In addition, there were potential risk, which the paper I cited also studies, such as pituitary issues, psychological impacts, and bone density problems. Although they also come to the conclusion that before we could definitively say those things, we need more testing. This is why I say in effect, this is just tantamount to experimenting on children. Because what the UK courts correctly analyzed was that there are not a lot of studies that do this. And so it would be monstrous to use these children as guinea pigs and say, well, we don't know if this will be positive for you long-term or not, but we're gonna go ahead and test it out on you anyways. And the children aren't old enough to make these decisions themselves, right? That's one of the problem with the idea of affirmed care that we have right now. We have gender affirmation care that organizations like WPATH suggest that we have. And that has the exact problem that I talked about. No other illness do we walk in and say, ah, if the patient says they have this illness, then the doctor has to affirm that that illness exists and treat from that accordingly. But for some reason we do that with gender dysphoria. That's not how it happens. You have to go to a psychiatrist, you have to get evaluated, you have to go multiple sessions and figure out what is going on. It is not just- How do they do that? How do they evaluate it? I had talking to a psychiatrist, just like any other mental issue. Okay, you say, for example, do you agree that we have what's called gender affirming care in the United States and in many places around the world? And in fact, that's what WPATH recommends, gender affirming care. Gender affirming care, as in like they affirm your gender. I don't think that is what a psychiatrist, I think a psychiatrist actually tries to figure out if you have gender dysphoria. That's not true. So if you listen to Abigail share, as a result of the 60 minute broadcast that occurred the other day where we had people that were de-transitioning and a lot of the problems that occurred with that, they talk specifically about a lot of people in the medical profession, even trans doctors themselves are afraid to tell people that perhaps they shouldn't get these interventions because of gender affirming care. And they're told by boards of medicine and it's even in law in over, I think 10 states that say that it is illegal for doctors to say, actually no, you're not the gender that you think you are. So if someone comes in and they were biologically a male and they're 12 years old and they say, actually, I think I'm a female, they have to start under the assumption, okay, you are a female. And because of that, that means that they're afraid to say, well, wait a minute, maybe these sort of things aren't beneficial to you. But let me ask you this though, assuming that you're right. You're saying they can't say no, that is absolutely not true. That you think you're right. Legally in some states, they can't just go to saying. Right, legally in some states they can't. And then there's massive societal pressure to say that they not say no. For example, there's an entire, like for even having this debate, the last time I had this debate, I was called a Nazi over and over. Do I sound like a Nazi? No, I've trans friends. I think that anyone who treats trans people that intentionally uses the wrong pronouns is horrible. I think that anyone that treats trans people as inferior in any way needs to check themselves. It's a horrible position. And yet I'm called a Nazi for actually just looking at the science behind this. You don't think the same thing would happen in the medical profession? Of course it does. There's massive pressure, massive pressure to accept, and there's financial incentives for doctor to diagnose children as trans because they know that that's a patient they'll have for many, many more years as there'll be therapies, pharmacological interventions, surgery, et cetera. I have heard that. I haven't from social conservatives. I have not, I have never heard like you get, they say you get social credit now for being transgender, which is not something I've ever experienced in real life. I don't think that psychiatrists are trying to push it. I don't think they're trying to sell it. I know that is the common thing. I think that psychiatrists are trying to get down to what you actually have. Is there, do we have a big pharma problem? Do we sell too many pills? Possibly. But you can say that to all of this stuff. That's absolutely right. Let me give you an example. So let me give you an example. Again, according to WPATH, 77% to 96% of all children that experience gender dysphoria grow out of it without any intervention. Yet we now have an industry that's trying to pump these medications into people or into children. Remember the last time this occurred? You remember the Ritalin craze? The ADD craze? Right? We started pumping, right? We started doctors. Now you would say the doctors are smart, the doctors are ethical. And yet they pumped kids that didn't need it full of these drugs. The same could be said of the fentanyl and the opioid epidemic. We had doctors that weren't behaving ethically that were prescribing people pain medications that caused them a lifetime of physical and mental pain and addiction problems because they weren't thinking of the long-term effects and instead were thinking of short-term dollars. Again, I'm providing the studies, the most comprehensive studies that have been done by healthcare systems that we say are vastly superior to the United States that have looked at the best studies and said, we've come to the conclusion that there is no evidence that there's a net benefit to giving puberty blockers to these children. And I already told you what I would do, you still treat the kids compassionately, you still counsel them through therapy, you allow them to have the options when they're an adult and they're able to consent to make these life-changing decisions. But I would like to get to some of the possible negative consequences of these puberty blockers. Because it's not all, we've come to the conclusion that you can't articulate the positives of puberty blockers. The only thing you've been able to say is, well, your hair's falling out and it could help you so your hair doesn't fall out. That's hardly a reason to test pharmacologically on children. So I want, first of all, I want to push back on this. So a study I have, which I can give a link from 2018, a critical commentary on follow-up studies and the assistance theories about transgender and gender non-conforming children. It's been widely suggested over 8% of children come to identify as cisgender as they mature with the assumption that for this 80% of trans identity was a temporary phase. This statistic is used as the scientific rationale for discouraging social transition for pre-bettal children. This article is a critical commentary on the limitations of this research and a caution against using these studies to develop care recommendations for gender non-conforming children. I'll link this and that. Right, so again, WPAT, which we've already agreed is considered the gold standard for medical transgender activism, cites in their very report that the number is 96% to 77% of children that grow out of gender dysphoria without medical interventions. You disagree with that study now? You disagree with their conclusion there? I disagree with the conclusion that you're drawing, which is because so what in your views or if so many, don't decide because the not deciding to transition is part of my premise. The whole point of being able to take puberty blockers is so you can transition or detransition. And the benefit, of course, is if they are transgender, then the world is theirs. Then they assimilate much easier, like I said. They transition much easier. They don't have any of the negative side effects that a person would normally have from having a hormonal puberty. Again, so again, what you're talking about then is image. And with image, the problem is that you can't quantify image. So what you're quantifying is because of the change in image, the psychological impact that it has on people. So if you are born male and you're transitioning to female and you don't have puberty blockers, all of a sudden you turn 14 and you're showing characteristics, maybe you have a hairy chest or maybe you're growing facial hair and stuff like that. And I'm trying to steal manual here. So you're saying that the problem with that is it has a psychological impact on people, correct? I would say that don't just poo poo the looks and the feelings because that is the entire premise. We really are just talking about feelings and our brain to begin with. Gotcha. So I'm glad that you would admit that. Again, I refer you back to the studies that I cited to you that said that therapy was just effective as puberty blockers in psychological health, in things like depression, in things like anxiety, et cetera that comes with gender dysphoria. So you're saying, oh, you're making the assumption if we give puberty blockers, that will increase people's mental health because it'll make their physical image look closer to the way they want. But the reality is the studies don't show that. They don't show that at all as I've already been able to prove with the evidence that I provided. Okay, I'll just counter that evidence. You didn't. I can read the teethering of childhood, gender diverse diversity of the framework of desistence or persistence has stifled advancements in our understanding of children's gender and all of its complexity. These follow-up studies fall short in helping us understand what children need as work begins in the eighth versions of the standards of care by the World Professional Association for transgender health. The thing we're quoting, the thing we're talking about, we call for a more inclusive conceptual framework that takes children's voices seriously, listening to children's experiences will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the needs of gender non-conforming children and provide guidance of scientific and leg. Okay, what you're doing is just reading someone's opinion. That's not a study. You're reading doctors' opinions, right? And what that study is saying is, it's saying, oh, let me clarify. It's an article for the International Journal. So again, let me clarify to the audience what's happening here. You're reading an article from this site or whatever, these people, and this is what the article's saying. Oh, we're seeking to answer the fact that the majority of children that experience gender dysphoria grow out of it. And what they're saying is, although that may be true, that's not the whole conversation. And in reality, we should still listen to children when they talk about experiencing gender dysphoria and have a comprehensive way of dealing with it. That is not a rebuttal to actual scientists that have compiled nine studies, including five observational and four longitudinal studies, the best studies they could find with the biggest control groups that came to the conclusion that there is no benefit to the psychological health of people that are on puberty blockers. These doctors saying, we recommend listening to children and taking them serious, is it a rebuttal to the studies that occurred? And again, like, you can't get away from this. You're just Googling right now. You're Googling doctors and people that say, oh, we think it's good, we think it's good. Okay, but where's the study? You think it's good, great, where's the study? But I, okay, I link the study in chat. You can go, you can go click. Okay, so then this is what I want you to do. That study will say- You want me to read the results of the study? I read the conclusion. You want me to read the results of the study? By the way, you were just reading, at this point, you're just saying my study versus your study. Results, methodological, theoretical, ethical and imperative concerns regarding four desistent studies are presented. The authors clarify the historical and clinical context within these studies were conducted to deconstruct assumptions in interpretations of the results. The discussion makes distinctions between the specific evidence provided by these studies versus the assumptions that have shaped recommendations for the care. The affirmative model is prevented as a way to move away from the question of how should children's identities develop over time toward a more useful question? How should children best be supported as their gender identity develops? I didn't hear anywhere in there saying, we gave 733 children puberty blockers. And of that, 672 said that it was beneficial. Didn't hear anything like that. Didn't hear, we had a control group. There was additional 700 children with gender dysphoria that we didn't give puberty blockers, but we offered them therapy. Here were the differences between the control group and the people that got puberty. I didn't hear anything like that. I just heard, literally, their conclusion said, we should have gender affirming therapy, the very thing that I was criticizing. That's all it is. This isn't a study that looked at children that were receiving puberty blockers. That's not science. This is just someone's opinion saying, it would be nice to treat people with gender affirmation, right? I've already criticized this is why that's a problem. So this study that you're citing, again, I'm willing to read the studies. I'm willing to read the studies. My question is, why do you think if this study is so persuasive, why would the UK health system potentially ignore this? Why would they instead focus on these studies that actually look at children real quick? Why would they instead choose to look at studies that actually looked at children that were on puberty blockers versus control groups? Why didn't they just take this medical body's word for it? Why did they bother to look at children that actually were on puberty blockers to make a decision? Well, first of all, I think the UK is currently going through a little bit of a reactionary phase, specifically. But I think generally speaking, in most Western worlds, the medical and scientific view is to have a psychiatrist evaluate the child and figure out what is going on. One of those solutions is to put them on puberty blockers. It is with their parents and with a doctor's, I'll say a doctor's note with a doctor's advice. You can't just go and randomly get this. This is not something that I think if they ever found out a woman, or not a woman, I feel bad, that's a stereotype. Someone trying to push it on their child, they wanna get that. We are just trying to minimize suicides and also once again, this looks thing. I mean, to poo poo looks, it is the whole thing. I mean, we are dealing with just to circle back around. What is inside our own brains? Okay, so again, I'm not poo pooing the looks thing. I'm saying the look thing, the way we quantify is with people's mental health. So if people have a problem because they have gender dysphoria and they have a problem with their looks, ultimately that could lead to depression, anxiety, suicide, et cetera. So when we're looking at studies that say we find that puberty blockers did not alleviate depression, did not alleviate anxiety, did not alleviate suicide, you're just jumping to the assumption, ah, if they have the puberty blockers, then that proves that would alleviate all this stuff. You've yet to provide one study that suggests that's the case. The study you provided indirectly goes to the criticism that I had with gender affirmation, which you said doesn't exist. The very study that you just pushed says that. Let me read again what your study says, right? Under results, the author clarifies the historical and clinical context within these studies were conducted to deconstruct assumptions in interpretations of the results. The discussion makes distinctions between specific evidence provided by these studies versus the assumptions they have shaved as recommendations. Quote, the affirmative model is presented as a way to move away from the question of how should children's gender identities develop over time toward a more useful question? How should children best be supported as their gender identity development? That's exactly what they're talking about, gender affirmation. If you come in, if you're a psychologist and someone comes in and they're 12 and they were born a biological male and says, I'm a woman, they're saying we should adopt the affirmative model that says, yes you are. How can we help you best? That's what happens over and over again. And that's why we can see these studies that show the majority of children grow out of this without pharmacological interventions. And yet doctors are prescribing these interventions which tragically leads to psychological problems in the future. It leads to them less likely to go back to as they would have without intervention to their biological sex. And there's other problems. So for example, do you know what the most common hormone blocking drug is? It's a drug called luprin, right? Luprin and I have a source here that talks about all sorts of problems. Younger patients have endured similar side effects. The Atlantic Journal Constitution reported in younger patients' traumas after receiving luprin treatment for precocious puberty. Now 22, Brooklyn Harbourin was injected with luprin at the age of 10 and soon found herself in such severe pen she ended up in a wheelchair. Dr. Cenerbo, an Atlantic gynecologist who specializes in endometriosis surgery reports having seen many women suffering memory loss and joint pain after luprin treatment. He quoted as a warning that luprin or any similar types of medication should never be given to someone under the age of 21. Then there's problems with bone density, which I could cite, but it will be a... So again, you have yet to prove the cases on you and the people advocating that we have pharmacological chemical restraints into the way people naturally grow. Why it would be net beneficial to do that? Why that's something that's necessary to do? And you've been unable to present that. You haven't presented one study that talked about the positive effects of puberty blockers. You just presented a study that said we should have gender affirmation. You link studies that had benefits of puberty blockers. You're basically taking the links from transgender organizations that have all the benefits and you're like, they don't have any benefits. It's like, why are you... Okay, the benefits once again for puberty blockers is that someone who is being destroyed on the inside from how they look is able to stop that damage and reevaluate whether they want to be a feminine or masculine person of Western society. I mean, the benefit is that they will eventually be able to look in the mirror and like who they are. I mean, it is something that I hope every human being gets to do and I want to read just further. Puberty blockers are sometimes subscribed off-label with the FDA, the young transgender people to temporarily halt the development of secondary sex characteristics. Puberty blockers allow patients more time to solidify their gender identity without developing secondary sex characteristics. If a child later decides not to transition to another gender, the medication can be stopped, allowing puberty to proceed as the effects are fully reversible. Puberty blockers give transgender youth a smoother transition into their gender identity as an adult. Okay, so again, what you can see is... One last thing, one last thing. While few studies have examined the effects of puberty blockers for non-gender-conforming of transgender adolescents, the studies that have been conducted indicate these treatments are reasonably safe and can improve the psychological well-being in these individuals. A 2020 UK Department of Health Commission review found the quality of evidence, so no, uh-oh. Puberty blockers, outcomes regarding mental health quality of life and the impact of gender dysphoria. Right, so we saw what the UK evaluation actually determined. We saw exactly what it determined. It determined that they looked at all these studies, just like your studies suggesting they were going to do, and they concluded in 2021, as if the exact evidence that I presented to you, that the studies that suggested that this was positive were low quality and they didn't have confidence in them, and that there were credible studies that suggested, although we still need more research into this, that there were actual side effects, the serious side effects that people had. The problem is this, you keep just like, like anyone could do this. You could find someone to say anything online. Show, point to the studies that you're suggesting and then we'll compare study to study. Let's do that. Let's see how their studies like, let's see how many people it did. So I pointed to one, the one that's most commonly cited is that they interviewed tens of, they surveyed tens of thousands of transgender people and seven of them admitted to taking puberty blockers when they were young and they asked them, are you still transitioned? And they said, yes. That's the study that most people say, that's not a study, that's a survey. And again, like I don't understand, like I hope that the audience sees what's going on here regardless what your initial position on this is. I'm actually citing review boards that took the best studies and it came to the conclusion that despite what Amy's telling you here that, oh, it just must be true. It must be true if people want to look a certain way, real quick, if people want to look a certain way and we could block their puberty and it helps them look that way, then it must be better with their mental health. But that's not the case. That's not what the science bears out. When we actually did the study and researched the people that received puberty blocker, it turned out that the control group that was receiving therapy did just as well as the people that received therapy and the puberty blockers. And there were significant consequences and possible side effects that came with taking the puberty blockers. So again, the idea of it just makes sense is basically what my opponent's saying here. It just makes sense if you give them time, if you give them time and their body image can look more to the way they want, that they'll not suffer these mental consequences. That's not true. That's not what we see bared out when we actually give puberty blockers to children. And again, these children aren't old enough to consent and know what's best for them. They're not old enough to know it. And it's tragic that we're basically experimenting on this children, probably because of people's political preferences or what adults want to have happened. But we don't allow children to say, I want on fentanyl. We don't allow children to say, I want on these psychotropic medications. Why would we allow them to say, I feel that I'm the opposite gender and therefore I want pharmacological interventions? It's nonsense. Again, I default back to this. Amy understands that we have to look at the potential risks because she's viscerally against surgery for children, gender reassignment surgery. So she, all of the arguments she's making against me when it comes to pharmacological interventions, someone more radical than her could make to her for her being against gender reassignment surgery for children. But what would you say to your daughter? What would you say to her? What if her hair was falling out? Why would you tell her she can't have this surgery? And Amy's going to make the reasonable position because that's a long-term effect that could affect people and there's a great deal of potential side effects. And we don't need that surgery to have a positive body image and to have positive psychological interventions for the child. That's what she would say and she would be right. It's just that she wants to forgo all the credible literature. Again, why would the UK and Sweden and Finland, why would they decide to compile all of this research and come to the conclusion that we shouldn't give purity? But are they malicious? Are they bigots? No, it's not. And I think there's a difference. I feel like the whole point of me backing puberty blockers is because of the reversibility. Like surgery is not reversible. Surgery is a major one-time thing that... A lot of people ask. Like you're saying, should we allow children fentanyl? Should we just allow children to chop off their arm? No, we need parents to be parents. My position is not to allow kids to just do whatever they want. To me, this is like a trinity. It has to be the child, the parent, and the doctor. Like they all need to be on sync and trying to figure out, like Rob agreed, where we're just trying to figure out what is best for the child. I know both sides sometimes think the other one is trying to do child abuse. I don't think that. I think we are both trying to figure out what is best for children. This may be... Okay, so on the issue, I'm sorry. We can go on a bit more to the open dialogue. Though I want to give you guys a heads up that will probably go into the open, or I should say the Q&A shortly. And letting you guys in the chat know as well, we are hoping to go into Q&A. If you happen to have any questions, feel free to fire them into the old live chat. And our guests, again, are linked in the description in case you haven't already checked those links out. Okay, so again, we've already talked about potential side effects. I could go into a lot more of that, but we're late in the debate. Suffice it to say the CDC has received over 24,000 credible serious medical issues with people that took lufferin, which is the primary puberty blocker that's used. We've had endometriosis. People that specialize in that say that it would be horrific to give this drug to anyone under the age of 21, which is exactly what we're talking about. These things aren't reversible. In addition, two more things to talk about reversibility. From, I'll link this. Sorry, I'm a boomer. It takes me a while to link this stuff. So I apologize for that, but let me read. You really are a boomer? I am. 36, do I still qualify as a boomer? I don't know. I think I'm like right on the cusp of. Oh, you're definitely a boomer. And certainly my technical skills are that of a boomer. So I apologize for that as we saw early in the, so okay, let me read this then. Reverse ability must be considered from both a physical and psychological perspective. Physically, a particular problematic result is the direct effect on the pituitary gland. Red wine, the expert witness on the dangers of lufferin mentioned above cited a study of impaired pituitary function. Quote, the most important finding of this review comes from study M8442. The study provides evidence that 62.5% of patients treated with lufferin for endometriosis had not regained baseline estrogen levels by one year after stopping lufferin. In other words, the effect on the pituitary was not reversible for the majority of those patients. Endocrinologist Michael Liedler also warns about bone density that may never recover, which I could read that if you want. In addition, there's the psychological impact. And this is difficult. I want everyone in the audience to think about this. It's difficult to wrap your head around. But even the transgender medical advocacy groups admit that 96 to 77% of all children that experience gender sporea will grow out of it without medical intervention. Say that your child's one of those children that's currently experiencing gender dysphoria, but like most children would grow out of it without receiving any drugs. Maybe you get them therapy and things like that. They eventually grow out of it. That's the case for the overwhelming majority of children. But you give them puberty blockers. Now what happens? Well, overwhelmingly children that get on puberty blockers usually transition to then taking hormone therapy. So if they're a biological male, they take estrogen. If they're a biological female, they take testosterone. Then they make the decision later in life to transition. They have transition surgery. Now all of this would have been avoided if you allowed the natural course of things to play out. But instead you severely altered psychologically the course of your child's life. And it led to a difficult situation. And I'm not saying this to disparage trans people, but anyone who's trans, I'm assuming based on the literature and my interactions with people that are trans will tell you it's very difficult. They deal with bigotry sometimes as adults. They deal with all sorts of medical procedures that they constantly have to deal with. Why would we force people in that position that are so young that they don't know whether or not they're in that position that most of them would grow out of? And the only reason that we're doing it according to the literature is there's no good reason that psychologically if we just give therapy that would just be just as effective as these hormone blockers. In addition to that, we could see that this sort of therapy that we're providing to children could be detrimental in other ways. And the only reason to take it as we heard here, I get it, body image, I'm not decrying body image. But at the end of the day, we have to say for the children's health, that's an unfortunate consequence for the very small amount of people that are gender dysphoric. And after the age of 16 or 18, we'll decide to remain as such and want to start to transition. It stinks to say this, but we would be much, much better to not offer them hormone therapies as a child and then deal with that problem as an adult because the harms of giving them that as a child on average are going to be so significant for the reasons that I already outlined. And the harms of not having it is just, it's gonna cost you a couple more tens of thousands of dollars to get the surgery you need to present the way you want. It's not debatable. We shouldn't be experimenting on children when the only positive we could give is, well, when you have the reassignment surgery, it'll be easier to transition. And so I guess that's just my little final thing. I assume, I see the like I, and I was looking at it, I assume it has like, it is the Federalist, but I'm sure they're linking studies. So I'm sure I'm just gonna go half and half on that because I don't always trust the Federalist, but in conclusion for me, a transgender child, generally speaking, goes to their parents after being depressed through suffering, through symptoms of gender dysphoria, being dysphoric of their gender, or at least symptoms of it. I will say that. They should be taken to a doctor to evaluate, is something going on? Is it depression? Is there something otherwise underlining it that if we pull this pin away, the gender thing goes away? Or do they actually have gender dysphoria? Now, even then, we should not rush. We should go one step at a time. We, in my opinion, and from what I've seen from the vast medical and scientific community, you should give them puberty blockers, which allows them to block either testosterone or estrogen, but also doesn't put testosterone or estrogen in them and allows them the time needed to figure out if this is just a phase or this is who they really are. And if it is who they really are, it saves an immense amount of suffering, pain, and possibly time, money, and energy, just trying to get yourself back up to step one. And so that is why I think a moderate approach should be taken and every situation should also be looked at individually. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Amy. We are going to jump into Q&A, folks. We wanna say thanks so much for your questions. We're gonna jump into them right now with Medus NCO who asks, or states, kids are treated differently in the courts because they are not fully developed mentally, but somehow they were developed enough to change their gender. I think that's for you, Amy. Sure, no, they are children. And even though I say adolescents throughout this, I don't want anyone to mince words. They're children. I mean, the joke is you're an idiot throughout all your 20s. I mean, how far do you wanna go? But the pain is real. Like there's no age limit on pain. And so when we are dealing with something with puberty, I mean, that is the age range that we're talking about. But even then, like I said, the adults should be steering the ship. This should be the parents and the doctors. Those are the people. They're trying to figure out what's best for the kid. You got it. Thank you very much, Amy. And then this one, Amaretto says, so what's Rob's position on hormone blockers used on cisgender people? In parentheses, they are used on them. And then says, as someone going into trans healthcare, Rob is more alarmist and undereducated and should actually talk to trans medical providers. Right. And so this is an argument that's made all the time. It's more of a kind of gatekeeping type argument where they say our side controls this information and therefore you have to accept it. Again, I read studies that compiled the best studies that talked about how these doctors looked at this and came to the conclusion that there were no net positives, no credible studies that suggested these interventions. The impetus is on the people that are suggesting chemically intervening in the natural course of children who aren't able to make these decisions themselves. They have to prove that this is a necessary step that occurs and they're not able to do that. Just saying, well, I'm a trans doctor and I know that we are. How does that compute with the actual UK and the body of scientists there that have looked into this or the body of scientists in Finland or the body of scientists in Sweden that have all looked into this and looked at the actual data of children that received these puberty blockers and tested them for things like mental health, anxiety, suicide, et cetera, and did not see the positive gains that we're talking about. I understand that it's persuasive to say, oh, I'm a doctor or I'm in the trans field, so therefore I know. It's not alarmism to actually cite credible scientists that have came to the conclusion in their countries that it's not safe to give these interventions. And you, the impetus is on you to prove that we should be giving these interventions. Also, I gave a lot of arguments as to why there are potential side effects, including the vast majority of children that experience genders for you will grow out of it. And so giving them puberty blockers that will alter the course of their lives by making it more likely to not grow out of that naturally as they would have, is something that is incredibly grotesque and inhumane. Cole Lowell, he has a follow-up, Super Chat, saying why is Rob forgetting the years of therapy, psychologists, and sometimes psychiatry before an endocrinologist or other trans-related health professional prescribes these blockers? And parentheses that are safe. That's not true. According to the WPAT, they recommend in Tanner's stage two of puberty that as young as 18 year old, you could have this intervention. So say it could work something like this. And there are many documented cases of this happening. Your parent, your child's nine years old, they start to experience signs of gender dysphoria. You take them to the doctor, they say they are going with gender affirmation therapy. The child says, I was born a male, but I think I'm a girl, I think I'm a girl. Well, the puberty blockers, we're going to have years of therapy. They're going through puberty right there. So we're going to have years of therapy. That's the argument. How is it that you could recommend starting puberty blockers at eight years old? So they're going through the therapy at five years old? That's the argument? No, the argument would be, oh, well we have to stop the puberty now for all the reasons that Amy said. Otherwise they'll start going through puberty and it'll make it more difficult for them to transition, et cetera. That's the way it plays out in the real world. And we hear horror stories of doctors saying that they're afraid to go through that because not only are there states in the United States that through law say you have to use gender affirmation therapy, but there's also incredible medical and social pressure for these doctors to do that sort of thing. And there's a financial benefit. And if you don't believe me, if you're in the audience and you're saying, oh, that might not be the case, don't you think that the people prescribing Ritalin and Opioid said the same thing? Oh, we don't prescribe them willy-nilly. There's years of therapy before we do that. I could tell you one of my loved ones, the second time they went to the doctor as a child, as a 10-year-old girl, they were put on psychotropic medications. The second time they went, not years of depression counseling, not years of therapy, the second time they went. And the same thing has happened with these hormone blocking therapies. Jumping into the next one, Amaretto asks, states, some people who de-transition or quote-unquote grow out of transness, just go back to the closet because of a lack of social support and financial problems. I think that's for you, Rob. That could, so that's a different question and that's for a different debate, but there are all sorts of reasons. So I actually had a study, I was prepared for someone to possibly ask this. According to the most recent study, this study was one of the organizations that was participating in the 60-minute video, they analyzed 237 participant, 92 were registered females, two-thirds of them had transitioned both socially and medically. Of the ones that de-transitioned, the most common reason for de-transitioning 70% was quote, realized that my gender dysphoria was related to other issues, right? So although it is true that there's a small amount of people that feel that it's not worth the medications and things like that, the vast bulk of people that de-transitioned, according to the limited studies we have, suggests that they basically realized that it was a mistake to transition. Gotcha, this next one, thank you very much for your question as well. Monomer says, let me know if I'm pronouncing that right, says, Rob doesn't seem aware that transition for young trans people is gate kept behind years of therapy and doctor's approval. The system actively discourages transition even for the people who want it. That's not true, as we already talked about. For example, if we go to the UK court case, right? So I already put this link up from Reuters, but this court case was brought by a person named Kara Bell. She brought the action against the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust after regretting taking puberty blockers at the age of 16. She feared it damaged our ability to have children. Bell who de-transitioned her early 20 lives as a woman had argued for puberty blockers to only be prescribed for under 18s with the court order. Quote, I'm delighted at the judgment of the court today, a judgment that will protect vulnerable people. I wish it had been made for me before I embarked on the devastating experiment with puberty blockers. She goes on to talk later about how she didn't go through many consultations. If you watch the 60 minute segment, which again, this shows the societal pressure, 60 minute was excoriated. The people that de-transitioned on there were excoriated as they were transphobic. They were terrible for even airing this. And what that talked about was several people that transitioned in the de-transition in the span of a year. They consulted with doctors no more than two months before they were actually getting the surgery. The same things happening with children. Again, if we look what it doesn't even make sense in the narrative that you have from the people that are advocating for puberty blockers. How would it make sense that if your argument is, well, we need these puberty blockers because once you start going through puberty, it's hard to reverse and it makes transitioning harder. But I'm supposed to believe that you go in as an eight year old and they say, well, we're gatekeeping for three years of therapy, three years of puberty you're gonna have to go through before we give these puberty blockers. Then why would they be effective? So you could see through their own narrative and you can see anecdotally and granted, we need more studies on this. But certainly it's not as if they're saying that, oh, it's only through years of rigorous making sure there's no other alternative. That's not what gender affirmation therapy is. And there were many children that are giving puberty blockers with only limited consultation. And even still, go ahead, ask someone. Well, how do you determine? We'll go on to the next one shortly. Give you a chance. Go ahead, I'm sorry, I'm talking too much. This one coming in from bubble. Oh, this is two seconds. Cold loyalty strikes against us. Rob, you realize that LePron is as old as me and approved in 2004. We have never had a more effective and safer drug. Good job, Amy, all love from Ohio. Again, so Lupron, which is the drug they're talking about is still one of the most common prescribed puberty blockers. So the dangers that we have with it still exist. They're also dangers with the other puberty blockers that we use. And the most effective danger is one that I've already articulated, which no one's able to get around this fact. 96 to 77% of people, according to the very same organizations of transgender doctors, will say that 77 to 96% of children without pharmacological interventions will grow out of this. But once we give them puberty blockers, most of them are locked in to eventually getting hormone therapy, testosterone, estrogen and things like that. So we are psychologically altering the course of these children's lives when they do not have the ability to consent to do it. It's tantamount to child abuse given that we see that the scientific body of evidence suggests there are no net positives that come from this. Next one, thank you very much for your question. I have thought, says great debate. Love the channel, James. Thanks for your kind support. We really do appreciate that. And I wanna remind you folks, no matter what walk of life you were from, we really hope that you feel welcome here, whether you be Christian atheist, gay, straight, black, white, you name it folks. We are really glad to have you with us. And so this next one from Marshall says, just sending love for Amy and trans people of all ages. And wanna remind you that our guests are linked in the description. I'm looking for any questions that- I did love that. Any questions that were for Amy as we have an abundance of questions, an embarrassment of riches when it comes to questions for Rob. But this one coming in for Amy, Rob, let's see. So Rob asks, this is in the chat says, if you had a machine that was capable of perfectly predicting the wellbeing of potential trans people and dictated that they would be better off after the transition, would you support it? I mean, this is a hard scenario because I'm one of those skeptics that doesn't believe in 100% certainty. So you, a machine, I mean, a machine that knows everything, I still feel like it might 12 to 16 range. I'm just because in my view, that is when puberty is starting to happen, that it's supposed to be dealing with adolescents. Once again, adolescents are children, but I feel like if a eight to 11 year old is suffering from those sort of things, I'm not sure how early it is to stop. I feel like you should be in therapy at that age instead. I feel like there has to be stages. I mean, even with a perfect machine, it just makes me feel uncomfortable just to say, let's skip steps because we have, the process is what makes sure that we don't misdiagnose people even with that perfect machine. Let's just double check. Gotcha. And thank you very much for this question coming in from Captain V says, for Rob, should the five to 24% of children who do not grow out of dysphoria be able to take blockers? I would be no, right? That's the problem. They grow out of, this is entirely the problem. So again, this would be if hypothetically we had some machine that we could see, what we know is when you walk in and the kid says, I've gender dysphoria, they show signs of it, 96 to 77% of them will grow out of that without giving any sort of interventions, right? Why would we take the risk for the very limited amount of benefits we have? Even Amy, the only benefits she could articulate is, well, your image will match more of what you think. But we could even see from the studies that the study seemed to suggest that it's not doing a lot for people's mental health, that actually the therapy seems to be the thing that's doing more. So why would we risk saying, oh, well, this might be that 4%, this might be that 4%. So let's give them a puberty blocker. When there's almost no positive effect of that, there's potential side effects to it. And there's a great chance that you've just altered the course of someone's life. And again, I can't stress this enough. It's not the fault of people in the trans community that this is true, but it is an objective fact. Being trans is difficult. There's a lot of mental and physical issues that come with it. There's high suicide rates, high depression rates, et cetera. Why would you put people in the position that would have grown out and not transitioned to now you're basically sentencing them to transition before they were able to consent? And the evidence suggests that's what's happening. Gotcha. Want to remind you folks, before we go to the next question, in the chat, this is a very nuanced topic as it's almost always kind of kicking up fire. Basically, the rules are this. In the live chat, as Rob had mentioned, if somebody is purposely using a pronoun that someone doesn't want to be called because they're trying to get under their skin, they're trying to be malevolent, that is something that we would block or ban a person for because we don't want people that are trying to be malevolent to our guests. We really appreciate our guests. And we hope that you would just have the decency of, I totally get wanting to challenge people's arguments, but trying to purposely hurt them is, to me, frankly, a little bit sick. So that's why you will be banned if you're doing that. We'll give you a warning, but the other thing is on the flip side is if someone, and we've gone over this before, but just so there's clarity, if someone defines, if they say, well, by my definition of male, if someone was, let's say, let's say a sign female at birth and they were trying to live as a male, I would still say that a trans man wouldn't fit under the umbrella of man. Well, we don't see that as being malicious. It's kind of their philosophy or just their position, kind of their conceptual analysis has brought them to this end point in terms of what their definitions are. That's where we would say, wanna friendly remind everybody that that's where mods, we would say, and I think the mods do a great job of deciphering whether or not it's malevolent versus it's just somebody has a difference of opinion over what a definition of a male or female is, blah, blah, blah. So do wanna clarify that for people as I do see it getting stirred up in the old chat. And so next, bubblegumgun has a question for you. Amy says, Amy, are you okay with kids taking other drugs? I don't know if they mean pharmaceutical or illicit, but we'll let you answer it whatever you want. I mean, not to do a dare port, but I mean, I'm not gonna support kids doing drugs, but I mean, once again, if a doctor supports taking drugs, do they need to have an IV drip so they can go under so they can have surgery? Yes, so I mean once again, as long as the adults are steering the ship, sure. Gotcha. Thank you very much. And then another question for you, Amy. Pedro says, thanks for your question, Pedro says, Amy, are you a gender abolitionist? I mean, I don't know, not really. I'm actually, my pronouns is just she and her. I'm kind of the middle ground in that. I accept gender non-conforming people. I love them, but I'm not non-binary and it doesn't bother me just having the two buckets. So I'm in between. Gotcha. And then this question coming in from Twizom11 says question for Rob, what would be the proper way to carry out, so kind of like a methods question. So what would be the proper way to carry out the experiments that would tell us in a satisfactory way if this kind of blocker therapy is appropriate or not? So for example, Sweden has dealt with this and I could read from the source if you want. According to the newest policy which went into effect May 21, going forward hormonal interventions for gender dysphoric minors may only be provided in a research setting approved of by Sweden's Ethics Review Board. The policy states that careful assessment of the patient's maturity level must be conducted to determine if the patient is capable of providing meaningful informed consent. There is also a requirement that patients and guardians are provided with adequate disclosures of the risk and uncertainties of the treatment pathway. It is not clear why that minors under the age of 16 would be eligible for such trials. So it would have to be in a clinical trial setting. We wouldn't provide, and even then, it would be very questionable as to whether or not we would allow this to occur on children until we saw that it was effective and safe under adults. So the way you would go about is as best as possible test on young adults in clinical trial settings, not giving these drugs to people in the general community with a lot of controls, placebo, control groups, et cetera, and a lot of interventions that you could have from the doctors over there. But even then, it would be questionable to do that ever for people under the age of 16 because they are children and we don't experiment on children. Next question, Bubblegum Gunn says, so you're okay with medical weed or cocaine, assuming it's medical cocaine? No, no, that was not my point. So no, I mean, I'm talking drugs is a funny word. It can actually be sorted out. It's more like a pyramid or however you wanna classify the different types. But no, I mean, drugs as in like they are sick, this will help them get better. I don't mean like, if you're asking me, should we put kids on acid? But no, my answer is resounding no. Gotcha, and I think that's it for questions, but folks, just to clarify in the chat, if people, this is it, this is the only way in which we're actually timing people out for the moderators. If they are purposely using a pronoun that somebody doesn't wanna be called, then yes, we'll time them out because they're trying to be malevolent. If they say that they don't think that trans men are men, that's not hate speech, it's not abuse, like if they have a different definition, there's all sorts of like anything you can do a conceptual, almost anything you can do a conceptual analysis of and you can find like, ooh, are these counter examples of the definition? So people are gonna differ on their definitions, do wanna say moderators, we don't want you to time people out for having different definitions. And so, oh, that's right. Bubble gum gun, I do owe you a question if you have one, I can read it and then looking for any other last questions. And Juicy, this is a, Twizom11 says, for Amy, are you okay with those tests being carried out before allowing it? Are you okay with those tests before allowing it as then more tests on puberty blockers? I assume. Clinical trials that I was talking about that Sweden's saying would be necessary. I'm kind of in between on that because I mean, I'm convinced that they are generally safe. I'm not gonna say they're a hundred percent safe because that'd be just telling you whatever but I am convinced they are medically safe as the answer but for more clinical trials, a hundred percent yes. We should always want more data, good data. I mean, hopefully the people doing the tests, you know, don't have motivations or whatever but absolutely, we should always want more study. Gotcha and this one coming in from Sunday Warships says, does Rob think that the 90 plus percent of kids who quote, grow out of gender dysphoria are in fact trans kids? If not, he hasn't been, let's see, on topic all night. Yeah, it's absurd, right? Because the way we identify trans is through gender dysphoria, right? How would you know you're trans unless you identify as feeling that you're in the wrong body, right? So the act of being gender dysphoric means you identify as being trans at that moment. The question of were they really trans or did you just think they were trans and grow out of it's irrelevant, right? Because the point that I'm making is most people how are you deciding who to give puberty blockers? There's no magic machine that says, oh, we know this is a person that won't grow out of it. That science doesn't exist. Maybe someday we'll be able to analyze brain scans and be able to make those sorts of determinations. It doesn't exist today. So the reason that the number matters and that it does apply is because that's the body of people that you are giving puberty blockers. Those that are in that group that 96% of them will grow out of it without, if you didn't give them those puberty blockers. The real question is how many of those people that you gave puberty blockers that would have grown out of it are now in a situation where they're trans even into their adulthood because they were given pharmacological interventions. That's horrific. That's terrible to do that. Gosh, yeah. Amaretto asks, is gender dysphoria necessary in order for a person to be trans? It's a great question, right? So I've had debates with this. I would, I'm interested in talking to people about this because to me and Amy, if you don't mind if I could ask you, to me it seems like the fundamental characteristic of identifying as trans is that you have a feeling that your mind or your soul or however you determine that doesn't match with the way your body's presenting. That to me is my understanding of trans. So that's different than, for example, something like cross-dressing. You might want to dress or act like an opposite gender. That doesn't make you trans, right? The distinction is being trans is that you physically feel like you're in the wrong body or that you're in a body that's presenting in a way that you don't feel. My question is then, how do you know that if you're not experiencing gender dysphoria? Because the technical definition of gender dysphoria is that that feeling is causing some sort of distress. So I'm not sure what it's like to be trans and say, oh, I feel like I'm in the wrong body but there's no distress whatsoever. Then how do you know you're in the wrong body? Like there has to be some feeling that triggers you and that feeling would be some small amount of distress which would be considered gender dysphoria. So I guess the answer to the question is I'm open to a discussion how you could be trans without gender dysphoria but I don't know how that could be the case. Maybe Amy has an answer for that that I'm unaware of. Give you a chance to respond, Amy, since you haven't gotten a lot of questions tonight, you wanna have the last word. It's complicated to me, it's on a spectrum and gender queer people may feel different, though I think this does include them. I would say gender dysphoria is that feeling of discomfort? I would say trying to get rid of the discomfort is the goal. So if a gender non-conforming person says that they don't have gender dysphoria because they are dressing gender queer, then in my head what they're saying is I could have had gender dysphoria but I am doing this so I don't have it. If that makes sense, as then they would have had gender dysphoria but because of our society right now they just went ahead and dressed the way they wanted. When you feel stuck in a gender, a lot of times you feel like you're doing it to yourself and so maybe that's their interpretation but for me gender dysphoria is that pain signal and the goal was to get rid of that pain signal. I don't know if that clears things up or makes things fuzzier, but there you go. Gotcha. And folks, I am going to be back in a moment with a post-credits scene to let you know about upcoming debates such as this one that you were seeing on the bottom right of your screen that we are absolutely thrilled about, namely a panel discussion with Destiny and Sean, actual justice warrior, as well as Victoria Hammett from TikTok and a fourth yet to be named guest speaker in the panel. It's going to be juicy. We're going to be talking about things such as what is and what isn't transphobic as well as should critical race theory be taught in schools, should the police be defunded, you don't want to miss it. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't already as it's going to be a big one and it's going to be partnering with Dylan Burns. So really fun. We enjoyed partnering with Dylan last time. Rob, is it fair to say that you're a regular on Dylan Burns TV? I think I've seen you on there a lot. I am a regular. I've had good friends with Dylan. I'm on his panel a lot. So yeah, he's a great guy. He's wrong about everything, but a good guy. Yeah, I really enjoyed Dylan. We really do appreciate Dylan. In fact, yeah, so anyway, long story short, you don't want to miss that one this Friday. Folks, it's going to be juicy. It's going to be epic. And I'll be back with a post-credits scene like you know, about other upcoming debates. But one last thank you to our guests, Amy and Rob. It's been a true pleasure to have you on tonight. Woo-hoo. Thank you. A lot of fun, Amy. Thanks so much for the conversation. Yes, thank you so very much, Rob. It was a pleasure. Absolutely, thank you. And then reminder folks, our guests are linked in the description. So hey, if you haven't yet, you can click on those links right now. Be right back. Ladies and gentlemen, that was an epic one. Really fun. And so we want to give a huge thanks once again to Amy and Rob as we really do appreciate them. As we appreciate all of the guests that we've had, the speakers are the lifeblood of the channel. We can't thank them enough. And that's one of the reasons why, folks. I mean, we really do. I love modernated beta and I have always loved it because I get to meet new people. I love doing that. Also though, we, in addition to it, we just, we care about them. You could say intrinsically, we just appreciate them for them. But also, folks, I want to remind you that if people are attacking people who are our guests, that's in my mind, I see that as attempted sabotage. No joke. In other words, sabotage of our channel because when they're like, oh, that person's an NAZI. Oh, this debate we'll for sure get. That's for sure. Well, I'm sure like we'll get reviewed. So they call somebody a Nazi. And our guests are like, geez, I don't really feel welcome there. That's where it's like, well, hey, now we're thinking that these people look like saboteurs. And so that's another reason why we're like, hey, not going for it. Now on the other end, want to remind you as if, let's say, for example, let's say the debate, you know, it's a debate on Christianity versus atheism or something like that. And let's say somebody in the chat says, hey, according to my definition, Christianity is a cult, not a religion. Now that might, some Christians might be bothered by that. They might be offended. But I've got to be honest, and this is nothing against Christians. I'm not trying to pick on Christians and say like tough, tough crap Christians. It's not like that. What I'm saying is that would be fair game. Now that's not an attack on the speaker. If someone wanted to make an argument that Christianity, for example, is a cult, we would say like, hey, you know, we got to be consistent if that is their definition. Like, even if we can't tell if they're fully sincere, maybe they're trying to get a rise out of people. It's like, they're not really attacking the, you know, the debaters. They're not attacking, you could say, it's not really hate speech. So, at all. So the idea here is there are fine lines, but if they were to say, let's say, you know, like, hey, this Christian, I don't know, like Mike Jones, they'd say, hey, Mike Jones is, you know, blah, blah, blah, dummy. And it's like, well, you know, now you're clearly trying to hurt his feelings. So that's where we would draw the line. And so, wanna say though, we are excited. Oh, that's a rattle. Thanks for your feedback. Says James, ring light is not good for you. You need a side key light and a fill on the other side to avoid the ring reflection in your glasses. That's good feedback. I do plan on working on that. Oh, let's see. So, it's almost better that way. Can you see the ring now? No, you can see a little bit. One thing is, I am working on a key light, no joke. And then I do have to take care of this ring light so that it's better because it is true right now. You can clearly see it in my eyes, but Oliver Katwell, good to see you. I wanna say hi to you in chat and say, thank you so much. We really do appreciate you. So, Oliver Katwell says, great respectful and informative debate. We do appreciate that. And then also, good to see you Matthew Simard as well as James SC in Sunday worship and Heat Shield, good to see you Jamie Russell. Thanks for your super chat. And thanks for coming by Jamie, good to see you. As well as Jabu, thanks for coming by. Pancake of Destiny, good to see you. And then, yes. It is going to be, we've got a lot of juicy controversial debates coming up and so we're excited about that. And so, wanna let you know folks. Yeah, we are striving to be a neutral channel and that's why I wanna let you know that this is basically, we have been discussing doing this for a while in particular. On the 10th, we are planning on it where this is in no way punitive. It has nothing to do with like tonight's debate or last night's, what was it? Yeah, last night's debate or any other debate. We are basically having these like new rules for moderators where we appreciate Sideshow Nav and all the work he has done. But basically, Sideshow Nav is, he's like literally written out documents and he's been doing some major work and sending it to me in terms of like, hey, I think that these, this would be a better way to go in terms of increasing our neutrality of the channel. And so, we are striving to become as neutral as humanly possible. And so that's why, mods, if you haven't heard, one, we wanna ask you to not debate in the chat, not to like kind of persuade people on your idea. Same way that I try to not persuade either speaker or the audience of my ideas on a particular topic like tonight. And Twizom says, does that apply to Hovind too? I mean, he calls people SpongeBob all the time. Yeah, I've never had SpongeBob call, him call SpongeBob, call people SpongeBob here that I remember. Now he might say that that's like a SpongeBob fairy tale, but again, he's making fun of their, the belief or the idea, whatever it is. And so, I would say, you have to be consistent. And Hovind would be another person that we don't want personal attacks of. And that's the thing is, I'm entertained almost by the fact. And I'm not accusing you of this Twizom, but I will say that with some people I see that they're like, will openly sometimes say, I think it's okay to be mean to this person though. And I'm like, I could sympathize if the person attacked them first, but oftentimes that's not even the case. Now, when I say sympathize, I still don't condone it. In that case, like for example, if a debater attacks the audience, I wanna say like, hey, debater, mind not doing that, keep it professional here. However, I kinda get how a person might be like, hey, I wanna just verbally defend myself, so to speak, but we still don't want people again, attacking the guests, just like we don't want the guests attacking people who are in the chat. Or, there are a lot of different ways. I have always considered like, do I wanna let people attack me? And for a long time, I've had a easygoing, what's the word? Easygoing and attempted stoic philosophy about it. I'm still pretty stoic, like I do. It's kinda like, hey, if people wanna say whatever they want, like they can say whatever they want. At the same time, I'm like, well, to be consistent with our culture in terms of saying, hey, folks, we're gonna need you to focus on the ideas, not the person. We're kinda like, yeah, we're not exactly into the idea of any personal attacks. But anyway, KJ Cortier says it could also be someone's belief that pronouns are assigned at birth, could it not? KJ Cortier, nobody denies that. I think the difference is that when they're in chat, when they're trying to antagonize and get people riled up, that's what we're looking for in terms of like, speakers are here such that if people are purposely calling them the opposite gender of what they wanna be called. Now, we're not saying that you have to call them by the gender that they wanna be called. If you wanna just refer to them by their first name in every single case in which you refer to them, it might be redundant, but that's fine. General Balzac says it makes the final call if you feel someone is being unfair, but I'd recommend bringing the specific issue to Amad to share with our team. Yeah, so we do, we are gonna talk about different rules, but wanna mention though, folks, on January 10th, we're planning on doing a reset. And it's, again, not punitive, it has nothing to do with anybody in terms of the mods doing anything the way they've done it, but we're basically to be sure that all moderators have seen the new kind of guidelines or regulations for being a moderator. We're going to remove the wrench of everybody, for real, this is coming up on June 10th, just to be sure that everybody's on the same page. Basically, we just wanna be absolutely sure if somebody's like, hey, where's my wrench? Like, let's say this Friday, they're like, where's my wrench or Saturday? We say, hey, we removed every single wrench, not punitive at all, for the purpose of being sure that all of the moderators had seen our kind of rules or guidelines that we want for moderators. So thank you, Nikki, for your kind words, just thank you, James, appreciate that, Nikki. And then German V says, is Dillon Burns debating or moderating? Moderating. And good to see you, Brooke Chavez. Thanks for all of your support. And then thanks for your kind words, Jamie Russell. I am so excited. I do my own haircuts now all the time. Ever since the pandemic got done, I'm like, I'm not going back. I'm not going back to the hair cutters. I got nothing against hair cutters, but as you probably know, I'm a frugal guy. I mean, I eat a lot of beans and rice, and then rice and beans, that's my diet. But Megan Satan is good to see you, says, James, great debate tonight. So glad you enjoyed it, Megan. And then Brian Stevens, good to see you again, as well as Hannah Anderson. Thanks for all of your support. And I want to say, moderators, thank you. You've done a fantastic job. It's not an easy job. And I realize this is something that I'm aware of too, like sometimes I'm keeping an eye out where sometimes a person will, for some reason, maybe because they had another channel, had a feud with a moderator, and then they maybe bring it over here. And they're like, well, that person was mean to me over on that channel. So now they're going to pay for it here. And I'm like, you guys have got to, I'm not going to try to be the judge and jury of your feuds. You got to let it go and not try to be getting each other in trouble here. And so heads up on that. These are all rare things, though, I want to mention, folks, as we really do appreciate that the moderators do a fantastic job. And 99.9% of you are awesome, for real. I honestly can't be more thankful. Like I love being here, I enjoy this so much. Like you guys make it fun. And so I just appreciate that. And Launderground, thanks for coming by. And then Reservoir of Horses, Spicy and Juicy is great. Poisonous isn't a great job to you and your mods. Thank you for your kind words and I couldn't say it enough. Thank you to the moderators indeed. They've done a fantastic job. Brooke Chavez says, we need more likes. It's true, we are running low on likes. And you guys, you may have seen, we have 16 dislikes compared to our 125 likes. Those 16 viewers, don't worry, those are just the Australians watching. So thanks for your likes from down under. And so yes, we do appreciate you guys. Timio, street cred to Timio for that joke. And thank you, Brian Stevens says, I would bet $10 you watched Dave Ramsey. Think I caught a reference there. That is true, yeah, that's right, the McChicken. Yeah, I watch a little bit of Dave Ramsey. I don't agree with everything with Dave. I don't have any like hard feelings against him or anything. I like there are some things that I'm like, I just don't, I don't know. I don't want to get into it. But I agree with Dave on a heck of a lot. There are just like these little things. And I think that has to be the case, right? Cause it, you know, there are so many like little financial like things you can think about. And so in that you can disagree on. And so anyway, but yes, German V says, where's my, where's my wrench? I don't know if, did we, did I ever give you? I honestly don't remember you ever having a wrench, but we are going to, like I said, not punitive. We appreciate all of our moderators like Hannah and Riley S and everybody else. And so I totally understand Riley S. Like I get where you're coming from. And there's a lot of subjectivity. I don't deny that. So there is, I don't want to be hard on you moderators. Like I'm thankful for you. It's not easy. And I think you've done a fantastic job. There's some things like, yeah, where it's like, maybe it's just kind of like, eh, like I don't know about this. And that's normal. Like there are things that, new things that come up for me all the time. We're like, yeah, I'm like, let me think about that. But anyway, church of entropy. Good to see you. Thanks for coming by Jennifer. Good debate last night, Jennifer. That was a lot of fun. People really enjoyed you and Tom. And then Pancake of Destiny says, James, so people have problem with using correct pronouns toward debaters. You should add a correct pronoun if you host trans people. Let's see. I'm open to that. Although there are reasons why I'm like, unsure. And the reason is like, we are striving for full neutrality. And I'll give you more reasons later, but I appreciate the feedback. I'll consider it. And Brooke Chavez says, thank you for your kind words, Brooke. And then Wreckit, thanks for coming by, as well as C.D. and Corey Clark. Thanks for dropping in. Evil piece of garbage. Glad you made it. Says, good evening. How are things tonight? Things are really well. I'm having a good night. I'm feeling great. That was a lot of fun. I really do appreciate both Amy and Rob. And so we are thankful for them. That was a lot of fun tonight. K.J. Couturier says, just want to say love the content. Just found out about you from Vosh and AJW. Happy I found the channel. Thanks so much. That seriously means a lot, K.J. Really do appreciate it. And so we are excited about the future, you guys. We really are. Really fun stuff coming up. And I am honestly just, I'm pumped, you guys. I seriously appreciate it. Thanks and hacks for all the work you do. Thanks for all your support. Unobscured, thanks for being with us. And then, but yes, want to let you know that though mods, everybody got that as a message mods that namely June 10th. That's where we're going to do the reset just to be absolutely sure that everybody saw like the new mod guidelines. I'm like shot. Like right now I'm like stumbling all over the place. But thanks for your support. Hannah says, please take a moment to hit that like and don't forget to hit that subscribe button for this debate. Folks, this Friday is going to be an absolutely epic one. We're excited about this panel and we do appreciate Dylan as it's fun to collaborate with Dylan. And then Little Miss Betty Page, AKA Tank Girl Junkie. Thanks for coming by. We are glad you were with us as well. And let's see here, did I miss anybody? Second horizon, good to see you. Harry Davis, thanks for coming by. And then let's see. Harry Davis is not treating trans people with respect is quote neutral. Hmm. Yeah, I mean, that's like the nastiest strawman I've ever seen. So I'm not even going to humor it. But we are excited about the future. And so we would say that if you would like to in terms of like, let's say if a person says, hey, I mean, let me get this straight just so we're on the same page. If they say, hey, you have to call me male or you have to call me female. Do you think that we should enforce it? That's something where I'm like, you know, I just don't. We are radically neutral. And I got to be, I got to tell you some of you are not going to like this channel. Some of you for real. And hey, I'm not trying, I'm not trying to be mean. You're going to be like, James is so mean and insensitive. I'm saying this channel will sometimes offend and trigger you so much so that if you're not able to like handle it and mentally cope and kind of learn how to adapt, it may not be the channel for you. I'm just saying I'm being real is that you're going to be offended here sometimes. It's absolutely true. You are definitely going to be offended sometimes. You know, we have debates. Like I said, if somebody wants to debate over whether or not Christians are a cult, like Christians might be bothered by that. Like we have debates on whether or not Christianity is dangerous. I think we've debated whether or not Islam is dangerous. Some people will probably say, oh, you shouldn't debate that. That's inappropriate, but we're going to do it anyway. And so the idea is everybody's going to be offended at some point, but at least we're doing it equally. That's my thing, folks. We're all about equality. And so very important that we offend everybody at the same level. So thank you so much, though. You guys, seriously, I really do appreciate you. So I hope you guys have a great rest of your night. And so want to let you know, but yeah, the funny thing is I usually people usually people at the extremes of any positions are the ones that usually get the most upset at the channel. And so that's an interesting phenomenon I've seen. Like it's fascinating, but yeah, I mean, let's see. CD says, James, it's not us getting triggered. Your mods get triggered. So that's obviously a hasty generalization to just say the mods get triggered, which is really sad CD. You should probably try to think a little bit more rigorously. But the thing is we are working on being as neutral as possible. And so when you just cry about it, even though you know we're taking active steps to be as neutral as possible, like I'm like seriously stop being a crybaby. You look weak. It really makes you look pathetic. Just being real. So here you are just continuously whining. So we are taking steps to become more neutral, but when people are still whining, it's like, you know, this isn't really making you look any more reasonable. Sunday worship says, hey, James, are you just sending out one size fits all t-shirts? Actually, I have got to get on the ball and that's why I should go because it's been a long day already. I have got to get on the ball in terms of getting people sizes. So that's something I'll message everybody for in the actual crowd fund. And so Dave Hill says, ironically, people with stronger convictions either way tend to make easier cult converts too. That's super interesting. I did not know that. That's juicy. And yeah, my thought though is we do appreciate you. Thankful that you're here folks. And yeah, I mean, we're always working on things. We're a work in progress. We'll never, like my moderating can definitely get better. Like I'll be the first to admit it. So my thing is we're a work in progress and some people are gonna be like, ooh, it wasn't good enough for me. And it's like, okay, like, you know, in these ways and it's like, if you want to do it in a constructive way, like this just like comes off as more reasonable rather than like crying or insulting or whatever, then absolutely. And that's why like, I am thankful for the feedback. But a lot of times it's like, man, like we're taking steps. We'll admit that we have growth. Like I have tons of ways in which I can grow. Like I'm totally open to that. Brian Steven says, I removed a comment calling the debate topic was, quote, child abuse and claiming the world was going to hell because trans exists. Was that the right call? They say that the world is going to hell because trans people exist. Then that sounds like it's, I would say hate speech. It's kind of like if they said, although to be fair, Brian Stevens, to be consistent, if people say that the world is going to hell because Christians exist, that would seems like that's hate speech too, right? I mean, it'd certainly be hate speech if you said it about like a certain race, right? World's going to hell because of this race. Like that's clearly, that's hate, like language, right? What most of us would think of that. So to be consistent, like there are a lot of people, like I've seen a lot of comments that will say things like, this world is, you know, terrible because Christians are here and stuff like that. And I'm like, dear gosh, like that would be hate speech under if we're going to be consistent. But yeah, so anyway, Brian Stevens, you made the right call. I'm just, the only reason I'm bringing that up is just because it's like we have to be consistent. And so anyway, but yeah, thank you guys. I love you guys. I honestly hate going. I hate leaving because I just enjoy this. So it honestly, I do appreciate it. And so thank you so much. Thank you everybody. We appreciate you. We love you guys. We hope you have a great night. SITUANAF says consistency is key. And that is what we are striving for. We are, and we're getting better and we're going to keep growing. That's the trick. I heard a great quote that it was so good that I actually wrote it down. And it is Tony Robbins. And I'm not ashamed to admit that Tony Robbins is a lot of what he says, not all, but a lot of what he says is you could say backed within literature in terms of cognitive reappraisals and things. I could explain more if somebody wanted to hear about it. But one example would be all it takes to succeed is to know what you want, take action, know if it's working, and then keep changing your strategy until you get what you want. And so that's us. Like we're working on improving in all these different ways. And so we are excited about the future. Things are going to be continuously getting bigger and better and we thank you for our mods. Thank you for everybody's support as it's just going to keep getting bigger and better. And so we appreciate you guys. Thanks everybody. Keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. Take care, everybody.