Emotional Blackmail About Suicide and Gender Affirming Care, and the Actual Reality, w/ Helen Joyce

This movement engages in coercive control and emotional blackmail. It tells parents that unless they go along with things that in their heart of hearts they know to be wrong, that they are harming their children. This movement is like the boyfriend who says, if you leave me I'll kill myself and it'll be your fault. And they suggest selling suicide to vulnerable children too. Like one thing we know about suicide is that it's emotionally and socially contagious. Like there's guidelines for journalists in every country about how you report on suicide. You don't give details, you don't attribute it to any one cause, you don't present the suicidal person or the person who committed suicide as being brave and amazing for having done that. And that's because we know that people who are distressed and in emotional turmoil and mental health difficulties, they read these things and then they go and kill themselves using the same mechanisms or they think that they'll get some sort of admiration for doing it. You know, it's very suggestible. And a couple of years ago, Anthony Bourdain and then Kate Spade right after with a similar approach to it. But yes, you're exactly right. I mean, sadly, it is a contagion, but they talk about it so loosely, they threaten it. And yet your book reports on the actual studies about the risk, the suicidality of trans people and kids. Is it true that as they say, something like 48 percent of them will attempt suicide if they don't get the, quote, gender affirming care? Absolutely not. So the best study that we have looks at the children who are on the waiting list for the NHS clinic in London, because the waiting list is quite long. So these children are sort of the same, basically, as the children who are getting the care. And they are more likely to self-harm and sadly, slightly more likely to commit suicide. But it's extremely rare for a child to kill themselves. And the figure is not at all surprising because these are kids who also have a lot of other mental health difficulties. There's outsized numbers of them who are depressed, anxious, self-harming, eating disorders, autistic spectrum disorders and so on. So those comorbidities, as doctors call it, those co-occurring conditions, that totally explains why you would expect to sadly see a slightly higher risk of suicide among these kids. And the second thing to say is there's no evidence whatsoever that allowing them to transition helps. They still have the mental health conditions. They're still autistic. They're still self-harming. They're still depressed. So the treatment doesn't work. Yeah, this brings me to the July 14th of this year, Wall Street Journal opinion, by several experts, experienced professionals, as they call themselves, involved in direct care for the rapidly growing numbers of gender diverse youth from all over. These clinicians from Finland, the UK, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France, Switzerland, South Africa, and even the United States, nine countries represented, wrote this opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago and said, and it was in response to the president of the Endocrine Society backing this alleged gender affirming care. All of it is a misnomer. And they take issue with the suggestion that this is anything of the sort. They say he claimed that this gender affirming care of the kind we've been discussing improves the wellbeing of transgender and gender diverse people and reduces the risk of suicide. They write, this claim is not supported by the best available evidence. Every systematic review of evidence to date, including one published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society, has found the existence for mental health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty. By contrast, the risks are significant and include sterility, lifelong dependence on medication, and the anguish of regret. For this reason, more and more European countries and international professional organizations now recommend psychotherapy rather than hormones and surgeries as the first line of treatment. They go on to say that this guy, Dr. Ham, who runs the Endocrine Society in America, his claim that gender transition reduces suicide is contradicted by every systematic review, including the one published by the Endocrine Society, which states we could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide. They go on to say there is no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure. I mean, this is so encouraging. Is it not to see this in the Wall Street Journal? People from all those countries, these are liberal countries. It's not like, I don't know, it's not like Russia. It's not like Vladimir Putin. You've got the UK, you've got Sweden, Norway, France, Switzerland, all these joining together to say, what are we doing? I mean, it's so hard to explain, isn't it? Except it's like a madness of crowds thing. Sometimes things go so badly wrong that people can't reverse. I mean, the moment when somebody who has gone along with what I've said is the worst medical scandal of the 21st century, the moment they realise that they might have been wrong is the moment that they realise that they have been complicit in a horrific human rights abuse against children. And people are very motivated never to accept that. So I think some of the people who are now most actively speaking in favour of gender affirming, a so-called care for minors, are people who have step by step got themselves to a position that they would never have thought was the right position when they started. But now there's no way back for them because the way back involves saying we, the endocrine society, recommended something that we now accept as a medical and human rights scandal. So they're not going to. They're, you know, they're going to defend themselves to the last possible breath and the last drop of blood rather than accept how culpable they are. And I heard you on Peter Boghossian talking about how a lot of the people who are pushing this, whether it's inside these medical societies, because the American Medical Association is just as bad, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the worst. Again, the endocrine society. I mean, these are terrible. They're all on the wrong side. But you were saying if you, it doesn't take a lot of digging to find the people at the top of these and similar organisations have a trans kid or have they, they have done this to their own child. This is the way I think a lot of people and this is nothing against folks who are pro-choice, but a lot of people who are the biggest pushers of abortion had abortions. And you've seen something similar in this movement. I think there's a very natural human instinct to justify decisions that you've made that can't be reversed. And, you know, it's that thing of saying, you know, such and such happened and it was the best thing that could have happened. Like sometimes it's the only way that you can make sense of your life. Like my husband left me and I now realise that that was the best thing that could ever have happened. Like we couldn't live if we didn't do this. But with the child thing, it's so high stakes. You've been told that the child will commit suicide. You did your due diligence. You went and you looked at what all the bodies that you thought were trustworthy, charities with good names, governments, medical associations, they all told you one thing. Maybe you thought this doesn't sound right, but you don't want your child to kill themselves. You made a decision. It's now not reversible. And so you become radicalised. And, you know, it's not even at the top of organisations. It doesn't have to be at the top. Often it's that there's somebody in the organisation and nobody can now speak truth in the whole organisation. So there are specific people I'm thinking of here in the UK who it's not openly known have a trans child, but it is known on the grapevine. And those people are the ones who pop up all the damn time to claim that women like me are, you know, dinosaurs, that we're the wrong side of history, that trans rights are human rights, they're going to dedicate themselves to these things forever. And you're like, why are you so sure? You know, there's nothing in your history that suggests to me that this is what you're going to be like, you know, this person might be, you know, quite conservative, have been working in some totally unrelated field, and then you find out why. I guess there's a still small voice in the middle of the night that says, what if you were wrong? And that's the thing you never want to listen to. Between that and I wanted to read this, I skipped past the end of our autogynophile discussion without reading this, and I wanted to. So you've got those people trying to justify their own life choices, their own decisions that are irreversible with respect to their children. And instead of owning it and trying to save everybody else's child, they want our kids to go down with them. And then you've got this other group of autogynophiles, you know, the men who are getting off on dressing like women or joining women's circles, and you write the following. This is so interesting to me. And again, eye opening, I was like, okay, this makes sense, because we've talked many times in the show about why the trans activists are the worst activists, the worst. I mean, they're worse than BLM. They're worse than anybody in terms of the way you must say it this way, and you must go along with everything that they believe. And you are still on the subject of Ray Blanchard. You say his observations of extremist trans activism in recent years have led him to believe that the leaders are mostly autogynophiles. Their anger results from envy of women and resentment at not being accepted by women as one of them. Quote, they direct their ire at women because it is women who frustrate their desires. Men are largely irrelevant. This is exactly right. They are such an angry group. And then you realize it's because, as you pointed out earlier, they need you and me to engage in their fantasy. So you've got them, then you've got these activists who made different life choices, who need to force them on us. And these are all the reasons, again, it's the theme of the show, why we must push past trans women are women. That's the tweet. Summer used to mean I was kicking off the sheets every night to try to stay cool. That all changed when I discovered Cozy Earth Bedding. Now I'm sleeping comfortably even on those hot, hot nights, and you can too. Simply swap out your current sheets for soft, breathable, temperature-regulating sheets from Cozy Earth, the brand with thousands of five-star reviews including my own. If you don't agree that you are sleeping cooler and more comfortably this summer, they will refund your purchase price plus shipping, no questions asked. And you get 100 nights to try them and then return them if you don't like them. How can Cozy Earth make such a guarantee? 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