TRANSCRIPT: Science, the Transgender Phenomenon, and the Young: Abigail Shrier

I can also tell you that they are generally holding down steady jobs and are leading good, productive lives. But today, we don’t just leave kids alone who say this and let chips fall where they may, letting some kids outgrow their gender dysphoria and others to transition when they reach adulthood. Today, we decide the moment a child seems not perfectly feminine or not perfectly masculine, today we say, I know what this is.

This is a trans kid. We take them to a therapist or doctor, nearly all of whom practice so-called affirmative care, that is, nearly all of whom have accepted that it is their job to immediately affirm or agree with the patient’s self-diagnosis and to immediately help them medically transition. Teachers affirm young children in school, both by teaching the class that only they, the children, know their true genders, and encouraging kids to reintroduce themselves to the class with their new name and pronouns. Therapists affirm and encourage minors down this path, and even pediatricians do.

The Controversial Use of Puberty Blockers

And the typical next step for these kids, after changing their name and pronouns to their friends and classmates, is puberty blockers. Puberty blockers shut down the part of the pituitary that directs the release of hormones catalyzing puberty. The most common of these drugs is called Lupron, a drug that was originally used in the chemical castration of sex offenders. To this day, it has never been FDA-approved to halt healthy puberty.

Now you might ask, why would any parent or doctor do this? Why would anyone stop the puberty in a child, even a child with genuine gender dysphoria, when that child would be highly likely to outgrow the gender dysphoria if left alone? Some say because it’s traumatizing to let a child go through the puberty of the sex to which they don’t wish to belong. The problem of this, of course, is that in many cases, puberty does seem to have helped children overcome their gender dysphoria.

But there really is no satisfying answer to why someone would do this, given that scientists have no way of predicting which children will outgrow the dysphoria on their own and which won’t. But the argument that’s made is that these kids can’t wait. The suicide rates for the trans-identified youth and trans-adults are very high, the argument goes, and so we need to get in there and start fixing them as soon and dramatically as possible. But unfortunately, there are no long-term studies that indicate that puberty blockers cure suicidality or even that they produce better mental health outcomes.

There are not even good studies that show they are safe for this population long-term, nor that they are reversible. There’s a big debate right now in the medical community about whether and to what extent the effects of stopping healthy puberty in adolescents is reversible if these kids later stop taking them. What we do know is that puberty blockers will block all the secondary sex characteristics, sexual maturation, and development of bone density from occurring. We do know that because of the inhibition of bone density and other risks, doctors don’t like to keep a child on puberty blockers for more than two years.

And we know that once a child’s healthy puberty is arrested, placing her entirely out of step with her peers, this seems to guarantee that she will proceed to cross-sex hormones like testosterone. In studies, nearly 100% of kids who are put on puberty blockers proceed to cross-sex hormones. And we know that if a child goes from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones, that child will be infertile. She may also have permanent sexual dysfunction, given that her sex organs never reached adult maturity, but she will certainly be infertile.

So the claim that puberty blockers are safe and reversible for this population is not well-founded. And the claim that it’s a neutral intervention, just a pause button they say, without serious downsides, is simply false. We wouldn’t accept this level of glib salesmanship in any other area of medicine. Okay, so those are the kids who actually have gender dysphoria.

The Phenomenon of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria

For the nearly 100-year history of diagnosing gender dysphoria, these little kids were what we were talking about when we talked about gender dysphoria. But in the last decade, thanks in large part to social media, there’s been another population that claims to have gender dysphoria. This is a population that never before had gender dysphoria in any significant numbers. In fact, before 2007, there was no extant scientific literature on their having gender dysphoria at all.

Teenage girls. This is the phenomenon Brown University public health researcher Dr. Lisa Littman called rapid-onset gender dysphoria. And it refers to a sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria at all.

Not only have the rates of these girls claiming trans identification risen dramatically in the U.S. and all across the West, over 4,400% rise in teen girls presenting for gender treatment at the U.K.’s National Gender Clinic, for instance. But teenage girls are now the leading demographic of those claiming to have gender dysphoria. What’s going on? The answer is social contagion.

One more instance of teen girls sharing and spreading their pain. There’s a long history of peer contagion with this demographic, of course. We know that anorexia and mental health disorders spread this way. And we know that this demographic, teen girls, is in the midst of the worst mental health crisis on record with the highest rates of anxiety, self-harm, and clinical depression we’ve ever seen.

We know that the population who tends to fall into social contagion is the same high-anxiety, depressive group of girls who struggle socially in adolescence and tend to hate their bodies. Add to that a school environment where you can achieve immediate valorization and popularity by declaring a trans identity and, of course, the delicious temptation to stick it to mom. Add further the great many trans social media influencers who can’t wait to convince troubled teen girls that identifying as trans and starting a course of testosterone will cure all of their problems. And you have a very fast-spreading social phenomenon.

I’ve spoken to families at top girls’ schools that will attest that 15% or 20% or, in one case, 30% of the girls in their daughters’ 7th grade class now identify as trans. When you see that, you’re witnessing a social contagion in action. There is no other reasonable explanation. These teen girls are in a great deal of very real pain.

Almost all of them have dealt at some point with an eating disorder or engaged in cutting or have been diagnosed with other serious mental health comorbidities. And now they’re being allowed to self-diagnose with gender dysphoria because the medical establishment that’s decided its job is merely to affirm and agree with these girls. A medical establishment that has, with regard to trans-identified adolescents, effectively turned its doctors into life coaches. Since my book, Irreversible Damage, was published in June of 2020, more evidence than I ever could have imagined has come out indicating that this thesis is correct.

The Case of Keira Bell

You may not know the name Keira Bell. This is a young woman in the UK, very troubled in adolescence, who was rushed to transition in her teen years and came to regret it. She underwent double mastectomy and spent years on testosterone, only to realize that her problem had never been gender. She sued the National Gender Clinic in England, and back in December, the High Court of Justice examined her case and the claim of similarly situated plaintiffs, and she won.

The court examined the medical protocols applied to her, protocols identical to the ones we have in America, and the High Court of Justice was horrified. It was absolutely appalled that a young girl had been allowed to consent to eliminating her future fertility and sexual function at an age when she could not have possibly gauged that loss. She had begun transitioning at 15. This case was called a landmark case in England.

It was covered by The Times of London, The Economist, and even The Guardian. It was seen as a real condemnation of the effort to fast-track so many young girls to transition. And one of the things the court noted was that the clinic had been unable to show any psychological improvement in the girls it had treated with transitioning hormones. If you didn’t read about the landmark Keira Bell case in the American legacy media, well, that’s because they decided to pretend it didn’t happen.

Here’s the transcript with added paragraphs, appropriate punctuation, H2 headings, and quotes. I’ve bolded important sentences and corrected spellings where necessary:

The Transgender Phenomenon and Its Impact

Just as they continued to ignore or dismiss the stories of the thousands of detransitioners, these are young women who underwent medical transition and later regretted it in an attempt to reverse course. A lot of these treatments are permanent, but they do what they can to try to reverse some of the effects. So in America, the teen trans phenomenon gets treated as a conservative issue. That is, a political issue rather than a medical one.

And so perhaps the greatest medical scandal of this decade is dismissed as a conservative preoccupation. Finally, there’s a third group of people we talk about when we talk about the transgender phenomenon. And this is the group that seems to want to eradicate girls’ and women’s sports and protective spaces. Many or most of these proponents are not transgender themselves, but they are activists and they are energized.

And they do seem to be winning. They promote dangerous bills like the Equality Act now before the U.S. Senate, which would make it impossible ever to distinguish between biological men and women, ever to exclude a biological male from a girl’s sports team or scholarship or a woman’s protective space like locker rooms and prisons.

And they would do this based entirely on a male’s self-identification. All that a violent male felon needs to do is announce his new pronouns and identity, and he becomes eligible to transfer into women’s prison wherever such laws are found. We have these laws now in California and the state of Washington, and as you might imagine, hundreds of biological male prisoners have already applied to transfer in. For this third group, it is not enough that we create a separate unisex bathroom while preserving a women’s room for women.

It is not enough to have an open category for those trans-identified athletes who do not wish to be stigmatized while preserving the girls’ team for biological girls. And it is not enough to keep a separate safe zone in a prison for those trans-identified biological men who might be at risk in male prison. No, they are working to abolish all women’s only spaces. They want all men to be able to self-identify their way into them, and they want to do it right now.

Three Distinct Groups in the Transgender Phenomenon

So these three groups are very different. You have the young children, some of whom do suffer with gender dysphoria. You have the adolescent girls, most of whom are caught in a social contagion. And you have the activists, who are using the other two groups to attack women and to advance their goal of chaos and social upheaval.

What these three have in common has nothing to do with real gender dysphoria. What they have in common is that they are all shrouded in gender ideology. Put another way, what they have in common is that they are all soaked in lies. Lies are told about the risks of the treatment we administer to young children, both to play down the very real dangers and to wildly exaggerate to the degree to which we know medical transition to be a cure.

Lies are told about the researchers and journalists who try to report on the social contagion among teen girls in order to discredit that hypothesis or to stifle its revelation. Lies are told both about the inherent dangers of eradicating women’s protective spaces and rights, and to exaggerate the degree to which this is the only way to save a community from suicide.

Gender Ideology and Critical Race Theory

The way to think about gender ideology is that it is a sibling of critical race theory. Critical race theory goes into schools to convince white kids that they bear the original sin of their skin color.

Gender ideology marches into those same schools and tells kindergartners, yes, they do this throughout the public school system in California, beginning in kindergarten, to tell preschool children that there are a great many genders. And while someone may have guessed at birth that you were a boy or a girl, only you know your true gender. Critical race theory postulates that race is the most important feature of any person and that white people, existing as they do in a state of racial privilege, are not able to participate in a wide variety of discussions about our democracy. Gender ideology tells women, which it calls cis women, that they are not entitled to their fear or their sense of unfairness as biological men invade their protective spaces and claim their trophies and records and scholarships.

In fact, women and girls can’t even use the English language to describe their problem since calling a trans woman biological male is an act of transphobic bigotry. Both of these invidious, mendacious dogmas have corrupted our schools, our universities, almost all of our legacy newspapers and magazines, the medical accrediting organizations, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, Pediatric Endocrine Society, and even our scientific journals.

Censorship and Bias in Scientific Communities

Just to give you a sense of how far things have gone, about eight months ago I was contacted by a member of the National Association of Science Writers. The NASW is an association of journalists with scientific backgrounds tasked with explaining scientific phenomena to the public.

And the member of the NASW who contacted me wanted me to know that a member of the online forum had been expelled for mentioning my book. I contacted the person who mentioned my book, who had been expelled, Sean Scott, and he told me he hadn’t even read my book. It just sounded interesting to him. He was immediately banned from the forum and labeled transphobic.

I’ve heard the same thing from endocrinologists and psychiatrists and pediatricians and scientific researchers who write around these issues. If they point out the risks of gender interventions, they struggle to get their research into journals, and very often there are letters to the editor pointing out flaws in studies touting all these interventions. Those letters aren’t published. The funding goes to research that promotes gender transition and downplays the risks.

There are phalanxes of young doctors now, many of them in pediatrics or child psychiatry, who believe their primary job is social justice. And they don’t hide this. They brag about it online every day. And you’re starting to see this kind of thing put into practice.

Perhaps America’s most prestigious hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, recently announced that it would offer preferential care to patients based on race. And on questions of gender, we’re seeing it with a mass celebration of transitioning treatments provided to young people by doctors who show an inexcusable complacency about the risks of these treatments. The Washington Post, just last week, quoted some of these young doctors and claimed that it was a factual matter that puberty blockers are fully reversible. That was the quote.

“Puberty blockers are fully reversible.” Except that that’s not something anyone can claim to know yet. They’re certainly not psychologically reversible, and they may not be physically reversible either. We simply don’t have the data yet.

So you’re seeing this startlingly quick corruption of medicine and science. And it’s a symptom of a larger, woke corruption of American society.

Transgender Adults and Freedom of Choice

Now there’s something I say every time I am asked to speak, and I say this for the simple reason that it is true. Transgender adults are some of the nicest, soberest, and kindest people I have met in my work as a journalist.

They have good jobs, they have stable associations, and they are leading admirable and productive lives. They have absolutely no desire to harm women or to push transition en masse on children. The activists do not represent them. I have met adult transgender people who seem to have been helped by transition.

But also, a belief in freedom absolutely requires allowing adults to make really consequential decisions about their lives. Whether it’s adulthood in a free society means that you can change your religion, you can change your name, you can take a dangerous job such as Andy Ngo and I have, and yes, you can choose to undergo sex reassignment surgery. And whenever I am asked, I am in conversation with a transgender adult, I always use their chosen name and pronouns, and I believe it speaks well of conservatives who extend this courtesy. But, and this is a big but, I never lie.

So I never say, and will never say, trans women are women. This is a dangerous lie. It’s a lie which, when promoted in public, leads to unjust and even dangerous consequences for women and girls. When we lie in public, we usher in all kinds of consequences, the obliteration of women’s protective spaces, and the destruction of women’s and girls’ athletics.

Rejecting lies, sorry, parroting these lies is not mere courtesy, whatever proponents say. It’s the cowardly surrender of women’s welfare as a sacrifice to the woke gods, and it’s wrong. In the public sphere, the lie is the harm. It does damage to our ability to communicate, to comprehend each other, and it makes it impossible to object in the face of unfairness and cruelty.

If, quote, “a trans girl really is just the kind of girl,” after all, there is no basis for objecting to a 17-year-old boy who handily beat all the girls on the track team.

The Motivation Behind Trans Activism

Now I’m often asked, why are the trans activists doing this? Why would a teacher tell her class of kindergartners that only they know their true gender? What could possibly be the justification for telling small boys that they might really be girls, and telling small girls that they might really be boys?

The biggest hint I got to the answer came from talking to detransitioners. Remember, these are young women who underwent transition and then later regretted it. Again and again, they told me that while they were transitioning, they were angry, they were sullen, and they were politically radical. They very often cut off their families, they were coached in this by transgender influencers online, and they rushed toward their new glitter families.

You’ll often see gender-confused people among the ranks of Antifa or at Black Lives Matter rallies. Having turned against their families of origin, they are easy prey for those who recruit revolutionaries. Put another way, the chaos is the point. Just as the point of critical race theory is to turn the American people against one another, so the point of gender ideology is to stop the formation of stable families, the building blocks of American life.

Let me say this again. This is not the goal of all transgender adults, but it is the goal of gender ideology and the transgender movement, namely the creation of a new victim class eager to join the revolution.

Pushing Back Against Gender Ideology

So what do we do about this? How do we push back on the onslaught of gender ideology?

First, we must oppose the indoctrination of children in gender ideology. There is absolutely no good reason for it, and it does very real harm. You can absolutely insist that all children treat each other kindly without indoctrinating an entire generation in gender confusion. Second, in public, we must speak up and we must speak the truth.

Always, wherever we find ourselves, at work, whatever we do, we must refuse to recite the lies. If conservatives are to confront these issues, we must know something about them. We must overcome our squeamishness. We must clearly distinguish, for instance, between transgender Americans, many of whom are wonderful, and an ideological movement which seeks to warp our children and wreck our families.

This is a movement that would turn our children against themselves because its advocates know there is no greater horror to a parent, there is no quicker way to bring America to its knees than by prompting our children to do irreversible damage to themselves. The people who have been pushing this ideology, they got a big head start on us, perhaps by a decade. But they have awakened a sleeping giant. The success of my book, the fact that I was invited to speak to you today, and the state legislators that are now debating these issues testify that a cultural battle is at last being fought.

We cannot afford to lose. These are our kids and grandkids. Our future literally depends on our winning this. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. This is the first audience I’ve been to that didn’t want to throw things at me.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Ms. Shrier. We now have time for a few questions. If you would like to ask a question, please come make your way to a microphone.

Q&A Session

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Abigail, a couple things. Number one, Caitlyn Jenner. A couple questions. One, have you ever met her? Number two, would you vote for her at this point if you were a California resident? And number three, if she were to become governor of California, how would this movement change?

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Okay, so I would have, you know, I don’t know very much about her politics. I really don’t, except that she’s Republican and supported Trump. I don’t have any problem with electing someone like Caitlyn Jenner.

I will tell you that she has certainly pushed back on some of the activists, and she has said that transitioning was easier than coming out and supporting Trump. I just don’t see that as a threat, her, you know, as far as I know her, and I don’t, you know, have great knowledge of her politically. I’m not sure anyone does, but I don’t see someone like her as a threat. Now, that doesn’t mean that someone who has a history of encouraging puberty blockers on children isn’t a problem.

The biggest threat we’re facing in America right now is, and Elizabeth Warren I think a week ago said that it’s transitioning care, you know, they call it gender affirming care, this is another lie, gender affirming, it’s only affirming your gender, that’s all we’re doing, is a human right of children. Elizabeth Warren said that. The moment it becomes a human right, every parent who disagrees with it has to worry about their custody. This is coming here, it’s already all over Canada.

This is coming here. It will absolutely threaten parents’ custody rights if they don’t go along with it, and when I tell you the parents who call me are politically progressive. The ones who have lost their daughters to this supported gay marriage long before it was legal. They do not have any issue with gay people, they do not have any issue with gay rights, they do not have any issue with transgender rights.

They simply didn’t think it was right for their daughter. They thought she had other mental health problems, and that’s an issue for social workers and therapists. They were undermined by their teachers, they were undermined by the therapist they paid for, they were undermined by their doctors, everyone affirms the kid, against the parents’ wishes.

MODERATOR: Question to the speaker’s left.

Medical Literature and Social Justice Infiltration

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you so much for coming, I really appreciate you being here. I’m a retired neurosurgeon, and I’ve been combing through all the medical literature, and it’s been shocking to me to see on just about every medical topic that this social justice infiltration has taken place, that the racial justice issues are also taking place, and that with our latest plague, the science is not science. This is not a valid scientific method for any of this. And it mortifies me, okay?

But also, there has to be more behind it. Granted, you’ve got your cultural and social and political issues, but are you following the money? Who’s profiting from this? And that will answer a lot of other questions, and frankly, this is more than just a cultural war, it’s a spiritual one, and this is the epitome of darkness.

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Thank you. Should I respond? Okay, so, sorry. Like I said, I’m not used to friendly audiences. Sorry. Okay, so, that’s right. I mean, there is a political, there is a question of the funding. I don’t personally, you know, there are journalists who have done work to trace the funding. I actually look at the culture. I mean, that’s what I do as a journalist. I look at cultural phenomena.

And the reason, part of the reason is, well, I do it because that is what interests me. I mean, that’s the truth. But I will say this. Conservatives are really good at understanding things and what we’re not so great at is fighting cultural battles.

One might say we’re pretty bad at it. Because we see an issue like this and we kind of say, ugh, that has nothing to do with me. Yeah, actually, it has everything to do with everyone in this room. It’s being pushed so aggressively in the public school systems that there are, I was able to, in my book, I talk about my investigation into the California public school system, and what I found was that there was no distinction between the activists and the public school teachers. The activists are literally training the teachers.

Doctors and the Hippocratic Oath

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you so much for being here. You’ve written such an important book. I actually discovered you in the interview that you did with Jordan Peterson. Which I would welcome everybody to check out online.

I guess I just wanted to expand on the previous question. I have a lot of doctors in my family and haven’t really gotten any satisfaction when I’ve tried to talk with them. With regard to the Hippocratic Oath and the doctors that you spoke with, I mean, how did they reconcile performing these surgeries and hormone treatments with that oath?

ABIGAIL SHRIER: I talk about this a lot in my book because I interviewed some of the surgeons who performed these surgeries. Anyway, I talk to them. I go through that a little bit, but one of the things I will say is this really is an ideology, and when it captures people, there’s a remarkable incuriosity about basic science. For instance, they will say to me, but they’re so happy. They seem very pleased. I’m saving lives. They believe that.

Now, Dr. Lisa Lippman, who did the original study on this, one of the things that alarmed her, and I talk about in my book, is that when she attended a WPATH conference, that’s a medical conference for transgender health. It was the old Transgender Health Society. What she couldn’t believe is that when they would discover, this was her first, she’s an OBGYN, that was her first residency and whatnot, and this was her first WPATH conference, and I think 2017 she attended. And what she discovered was that it was the only medical conference she had ever attended, this woman is a politically progressive, where no one was discussing the risks. It was a celebration-only zone, and in fact, they would then go on to de-platform speakers. Now, these were experts in gender dysphoria, like Ken Zucker.

These are not right-wingers, but if they were willing to talk about risks, or any course of treatment other than immediate transition, they were canceled.

The Deeper Motivation

MODERATOR: Question to the speakers left.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you kindly for coming and addressing us. Phenomenal talk, and on the bottom that you talked about the how, at the end you mentioned the why to create chaos. I guess I would submit it’s a little deeper than that. I would think that it’s just pure evil. And I guess my question to you would be, do you think that this is one of the roads to what a lot of progressives, uber-billionaires, talking about depopulization of our planet? When you mentioned that, what, the testosterone, and then our infertile?

ABIGAIL SHRIER: It’s hard for me to assign motivation without evidence. I would never make a claim like that unless I had proof that this was part of an effort to depopulate the planet. If there was evidence, I would certainly look at it. But I think the way to understand it is really to look at other radical left movements because they seem very similar.

They seem to be creating chaos in the population because if you have total chaos and overhaul, then what you want is redemption through this new political order. So that seems to be what they’re priming everyone for. But again, not everyone who promotes this needs to be totally aware of that, but they’re participating in an ideological movement that seems to be headed that way.

Practical Advice for Parents

MODERATOR: Question to the speaker’s right.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, thank you so much for your book. I have two children, a son who is 15 and a daughter who’s 17. They went to a very small middle school in Northern California. We know five girls in that school that are transitioning. One of them is my son’s closest girlfriend, and she’s becoming Tyler. Her parents went through a really messy divorce, and she’s politically very radical.

Another mom I just spoke with, her 10-year-old daughter came home saying, I’m binary, pansexual, and I’m identifying as a boy now. I don’t know what to say to her. I just need some practical advice. What should I say to this mother?

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Well, a couple of things. I think the book is helpful because my book doesn’t exactly tell you, I mean, it gives you some suggestions, but it really isn’t about what to do. It’s more about how to understand this. But to all of you, I would say, the moment you hear that, get your kids out of that school. I have talked to parents who have lost their kids to this. They push it very hard at many universities, and I can tell you how much less they care about that Ivy League sticker after their kid is now on hormone treatment because this happens over and over.

It’s completely covered by every Ivy League school. You can start school, and in some cases, they ended without their breasts. It absolutely happens. I guess that’s an advertisement for Hillsdale.

State Control and Broader Implications

MODERATOR: Yeah, go ahead. Question to the speaker’s left.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I just wanted to make a couple of comments. Years ago, I spent some time in Sweden with the military, and one of the things I learned about Sweden was through the people I was working with, where they said, we don’t own your children.

And I said, what do you mean by that? They said, we bring them up, we feed them, we put clothes on them, but we do not own them. The state can come in any time they care to and remove them from your family for any reason. Well, that started me thinking about it, and over the years, I have discovered that the Marxist lifestyle is to break down the family anyway they can, and once they take over, they can change things to fit their situation.

They want to create chaos, like you were saying in your book. This is all a useful distraction for something else that you’re talking about. It’s just one out of many distractions. So, the type of politics that we’re heading toward will be, the way the left works. This is not their real agenda. Their real agenda is control over every living thing. Thank you.

Connecting the Dots with Critical Race Theory

MODERATOR: Thank you. Question to the speakers, right?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you. Thank you, Abigail, for being here. That was a nice tee-up, really just to a comment to helping this audience connect the dots between your work and the broader theme of critical race theory. I think Mark Stein touched on this a little bit last night around the language of CRT and understanding what it is and us taking control back of our language. That’s really, really important, and I think Andy will probably touch on this around his work because it is all fabulously and destructively connected. So, thank you for your work in helping us connect the dots.

MODERATOR: Question to the speakers left?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I’m sure my wife is asking herself, what are you doing, Bill? But first of all, I want to salute you and thank you for your courage. You have done a wonderful job of presenting things that, for me personally, were always sort of lying under the surface. And I guess I’m to the point that I’m just tired of sitting and saying and doing nothing about it.

And I keep asking, you’ve given a lot of reasons, and justifications for what these people are doing with and to our country. But I keep coming back to the question of why and who. And I guess I’m left with the conclusion of, where are the roots of this and, dare I say, Satan? There just seems to be no real justifiable reason for what’s happening in America today. Thank you very much.

MODERATOR: Okay. Question to the speaker’s right?

Clarification on Infertility

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hey, thank you. I have a question. I was wondering if you could clarify something I might have misunderstood earlier and then also have a question based off of that.

You were talking about infertility, and I couldn’t tell if it was caused by the beta blockers themselves or the fact that they move on to testosterone.

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Okay, so that’s a really good question. Puberty blocker, going from puberty blockers so blocks puberty straight to cross-sex hormones, virtually guarantees infertility. Starting with the course of testosterone, most of the kids who, you know, many of the kids who discover this in their teen years, they’ve already been through puberty, so they go straight to testosterone. And that puts fertility at very serious risk for various reasons, but it’s not the guarantee that going from puberty blockers to testosterone is.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: But puberty blockers themselves, do those cause infertility or is it more what comes afterwards?

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Well, you can’t have a baby if you haven’t gone through puberty. So, of course, you aren’t fertile while you haven’t even been through puberty. And then if the puberty blockers, if you go off the puberty blockers, there is a chance, you know, you may just revert to normal. We don’t really have the data yet to know because we haven’t been experimenting on these kids for long enough. So, I mean, it is experimental treatment. That’s what we’re doing.

We’re conducting a mass experiment. So, traditionally, puberty blockers were used in many different ways. But one of the ways was there’s a condition called precocious puberty. And that is when a four-year-old starts developing breasts. So, we shut off an overactive pituitary, essentially, or we pause it. That was the idea. It was a pause button. And then you could we could take the kid off of it, you know, around the time it would be normal and healthy to go through puberty.

And at that point, puberty seemed to take its course without problem. The problem is we’re now putting puberty blockers into a different population. These are kids who are going through healthy, normal puberty. And we’re arresting that.

Effects of Puberty Blockers

And I’ve been told by many doctors, this is not my own research, but many doctors, when you arrest a healthy system, when you shut down a healthy system that’s operating properly in the endocrine system, there’s just no guarantee that it’s going to pick up where it was supposed to if you go off them. Now, again, we don’t have the research yet to know one way or the other.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you. That makes a lot more sense. So I guess my question is it sounds like we’re seeing that the current social trend is creating a hyperinflation of people who are or children who are have gender dysphoria. Is it possible that before now, there was it kind of skewed lower than it actually was due to it being a lot harder to come out dysphoric. And have you ever seen a child in the instance where if we found the puberty blockers were potentially healthy, where they could have the kids to actually benefit from it?

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Sure. So are there these kids who absolutely have gender dysphoria and might be helped by puberty blockers? Yes. It’s totally possible. And that is why I have never supported the bans. I have never come out in favor of banning a treatment that might potentially work for one child or be appropriate for one child. I’m totally open to the possibility that it might be appropriate for one child.

Now, the other question. How do we know we’re not reverting to a normal base rate? How do we know this isn’t the rate that we would all be at? This isn’t the number of transgender people we would always have seen if not for all the stigma and harassment that they experience? And my answer to that is where are the women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s discovering their transgender identity? Now’s their time.

Where are they? Why is it the same population that falls for every other social contagion, teen girls, with other mental health comorbidities? We should see this across the whole population. We don’t.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: It’s possible that it’s somewhere in the middle or even lower or at least higher than it was, I guess what I’m saying. We’re probably higher than we would be now. But we do see people in their middle age now who are transitioning and for the first time feel comfortable to do so. You still think it’s probably higher than it used to be at least.

ABIGAIL SHRIER: So is this the normal rate that we would, the natural rate that we would see? Is that what you’re asking me?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I’m asking if you think the 2007 rate was the normal rate or falls somewhere in the middle.

ABIGAIL SHRIER: I don’t know how I could possibly know that. How do I know what the effect of culture is? I have someone I’ve become very friendly with who was a lesbian for years and transitioned because she was involved with a woman who was uncomfortable being in a lesbian relationship. She transitioned in her, I think, 40s to male and regretted that. And I’m not saying that everyone would regret it.

Obviously, we make all kinds of decisions as adults. I’m completely fine with adults making those decisions, but if you’re asking me in the absence of culture what would the number of transgender people be, I don’t know how I could have any idea.

MODERATOR: We have time for one more question. The speaker’s left.

Final Question and Reflections

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I better make it a good one if I’m the last one. Abigail, I discovered you through the Megan Kelly podcast, which was excellent. And one of the things that drew me to you is your kindness and your compassion that there are people who really do suffer from this. And it’s a small number, but they deserve treatment.

And for those who are struggling, we need to be kind in our conversation about them. So I appreciate that about you. My first exposure to a trans child was through a youth group at church. And the church completely bent over and supported this child and really wrestled their parents to the floor when they tried to object.

So I would echo your sentiment that if you are in a church that is advocating this, get out of that church. My question is, kids, you know, teen years, the hardest years of your life, you’re changing, the hormones are going crazy. But we know girls develop around the age of 18, boys frontal lobe not fully developed until 24. So for those who are, sorry guys, what do you advocate for someone who really does need this treatment if we’re saying, delay, delay, let them grow up, let them fully develop. What is the age to have this conversation?

ABIGAIL SHRIER: Good question. I would say two things. One, to the point about your church, I mean, part of the problem is we have churches diagnosing kids, right? We have pastors saying, oh, it’s a trans kid. They don’t know, right? There are little boys who are effeminate and girls who are a little more masculine and they would just grow up and lead, you know, healthy lives. Many of them would become gay.

Some of them wouldn’t. But today, they turn around and say, oh, it’s a trans kid. They’ve already decided what the diagnosis is, what the identity is, and started them down a path. That’s, you know, it’s very unusual for a medical condition.

But there’s something else. You asked, the second question was, oh, what age? Well, here’s what I would say. I know a lot of transgender adults. And the ones I’ve talked to who are leading good lives and stable and good people and people you would absolutely want as your friends and neighbors, they have told me, transitioning is really hard. And they were really grateful for the time they spent in therapy making sure this would be right for them. They had to spend a certain period of time living as the opposite gender trying to see if they could do this. Because it’s very stressful.

Okay? Today, there’s no requirement. There’s no requirement that you get a therapist note. There’s no requirement for anything. I mean, almost anything. Right? So, depending on the age of medical, the consent varies by state. Okay?

So, whatever people ultimately decide the age may be, and I’m not a doctor, but whatever people decide the appropriate age may be, it certainly has to come with some sober medical oversight. And right now, we have virtually none. What they have is medical encouragement and celebration.

MODERATOR: Join me in thanking Mrs. Shrier.

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