Transgenderism: The Unintended Victims | Interviews

Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Georgia Howe with The Daily Wire. Today, we sit down with journalist at The Wall Street Journal and author of Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters, Abigail Schreier. Abigail's new PragerU video is titled Why Girls Become Boys, where she discusses the unprecedented rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses among teenage girls, theories about why it's happening, and the risks of medical transition, and what we can do to better support young girls. Let's jump right in. Abigail, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm actually a former public school teacher, and I'm a registered nurse. So this topic is actually really interesting for me for a variety of reasons. And one thing you talk about in the video is you discuss how as of 2012, there were essentially zero documented cases of teenage girls experiencing gender dysphoria. But then as of 2016, almost 2% of teenage girls or high school girls in the United States were identifying as male. So I'm wondering, what's causing this now from your research? Yes. I mean, I didn't say there were zero documented cases. I said there was zero scientific research, which indicates that there wasn't a large number, that it was so small that it was scientifically not written about when there were tons of articles and research going into the males, because we had a 100-year diagnostic history of that. So why is this happening? My work jumped off from the work of public health researcher Lisa Littman, who found that social media was playing a major role with these girls, and that gender dysphoria, because of it, had become a pure contagion, meaning that these encouraging each other, girls who were already in tremendous amounts of psychological pain, and we know that they had very high rates of anxiety and depression, were encouraging each other in the idea that transitioning was the solution. So it sounds like these girls are in a lot of psychological pain, and you talk a bit about anxiety, depression. From other sources, I've heard that autism has been linked to gender dysphoria for girls. What other psychological conditions are associated with this? Well, sort of all of the above. So anxiety and depression are two mainstays of this population. They're two things that this population of girls is marked with. They certainly have a lot of that, a lot of self-harm, a lot of cutting. And so girls who basically might have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder or anorexia and might have convinced themselves that they were fat in a prior generation, in this generation were convincing themselves that they were actually supposed to be boys, and that the problem was that they weren't, that the fact that they weren't perfectly feminine or didn't feel comfortable in their bodies was because they were meant to be boys. So are we seeing a decrease in those other psychological conditions, or are we mostly seeing comorbidity between those and gender dysphoria? There's a lot of comorbidity, but certainly, you know, I've seen different studies on that, but there does seem to be a lot of comorbidity. So you're seeing, you know, girls with a lot of other psychological diagnoses who are deciding that they are transgender. From your research, what are the best practices that are being put forward from the medical institutions for how we can treat this? In general, the medical organizations, you know, certainly the accrediting organizations have walked away from best practices. Best practices used to mean watching and waiting anyone who claimed to have gender dysphoria because we knew that in a majority of cases it resolved on its own if nothing was done. Today, nearly every medical accredited organization has adopted something called affirmative care, which means their job, as they see it, is to immediately agree with the young person's self-diagnosis and immediately proceed with whatever transition the teenager, often minor children, are demanding. And so that, unfortunately, is leading to, you know, we're seeing a lot of regret and a lot of unhappiness from this population. Do we have numbers on that in terms of how many of the girls regret transitioning or does it work out for a decent proportion of them? How is it working out for these girls? You know, it's very early to tell, but what we can see is that already the numbers of those regretting their transition just documenting themselves on social media is really spiking. When I wrote the book, I think there were about 7,000 members of this, you know, popular detransition site for those who had regretted their medical transitions, mostly young women, but a lot of people who had regretted their transition. And not even a year later, it was already up to 17,000. So we see very, very large growth in those regretting this. But I think it's fair to say we're going to see much, much higher because these teenagers who are unhappy are getting access to really transformative medications that will forever alter their bodies. They don't even require a therapist note. Very often, they don't require parental permission, and they're able to transform their bodies instantly. So I think it's fair to expect that we'll see a tremendous amount of regret. The title of your book is Irreversible Damage, but we're often told that these hormone therapies are fully reversible if the girls decide they change their mind about it. So what are the changes that are long-term to their bodies from this treatment? So almost everything comes with some major psychological or physical irreversible harm. You know, puberty blockers, which is delivered at the onset of puberty, so very young ages, you know, 11, 12, you're talking, that is a major psychological effect because, of course, you're taking a child out of the normal development with her peers and sending her on this other trajectory where she's not going to have secondary sex characteristics, not going to develop breasts, not going to get her period, not going to develop sexually. So it is a very big intervention. Of course, there are also risks of long-term health problems, including major problems with not getting enough bone density and other things. And then there's testosterone, which comes next. And some kids go straight to testosterone if they've already gone through puberty. And that certainly has irreversible effects. It can, you know, eliminates fertility. It can have long-term effects on sexual function. And in many cases, a prophylactic hysterectomy is recommended because it can lead to vaginal atrophy, uterine atrophy. It's a very serious medication to be put on. But the biggest risk, of course, is the unknown because we've never put young women on 10 to 40 times the level of testosterone their bodies would normally handle for decades. And the thing to remember is these kids become lifetime patients. As a registered nurse, I have given medication plenty of times to kids. And I know there's a lot that goes into medicating kids. We take it a lot more seriously than medicating adults in terms of the research that goes into it. And we usually will measure everything out by weight, which we don't do with adults. So I'm kind of wondering what kind of research went on to allow these doctors to be giving these drugs to the kids. So the truth is any journalist who's looked into this has found, as I did, that the research is very, very thin. A lot of doctors who are brave enough to speak up have noted that the evidence quality is quite poor. And in fact, some of the researchers have come out and said, I never expected this protocol to be used on this population. But nonetheless, because it's become sort of a civil rights battle or it's become cloaked in the idea of civil rights, we aren't able to question it. And I, for one, have never, never advocated eliminating all of these medications. I've just pointed out the risks. And that is enough to get you broadly demonized today. So that's the reason these risks aren't even being attended to. Let's say a young woman goes to her primary care physician and with a parent, presumably, and says, I think I should have been a boy. How does it go from that point forward? Is that doctor able to weigh in and say, I don't think so? Or how does it work? Not if they're in a so-called conversion therapy state. We now have 20 states that have passed these conversion therapy bans. And that tells doctors that they are not allowed to so-called convert someone out of a different gender identity. Now, this may have made sense when we were talking about sexual orientation, which in some cases seems to be immutable. But it doesn't ever make sense for gender identity, which even the advocates acknowledge is fluid. But because of these conversion therapy bans, doctors are afraid to do anything other than agree with the patient. So the patient walks in and says, I have gender dysphoria. I know I'm supposed to be a boy. And the doctor's official role is to say, yes, when would you like to start testosterone? How long does it take for the medication to kick in? So obviously puberty takes years. Is this a fast acting medication or a slow acting medication? It's pretty fast. So, you know, everybody's different and everybody's hormones are different. But, you know, through my interviews, and I conducted a lot of interviews, patients report having, you know, being able to grow a beard and having a major deepening of their voices within the first three months. Is there a community of doctors who are working on alternative treatment plans for gender dysphoria? Or is everyone basically just doing affirmative therapy right now? They are. You know, there's this Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, SEGM. It's a consortium of doctors from across the world, actually, across the West, who are trying to respond to this with some degree of seriousness and logic. The problem is, is that they're demonized everywhere. I mean, the one thing to know, and, you know, I found and other journalists have found when they investigated this, the expert, the world experts in gender dysphoria, many of them were thrown out of their profession effectively and certainly fired, like Ken Zucker in Canada and others, as soon as this new activist arm took over. We have this strange situation where you have the world experts in gender dysphoria in the position of being sort of dissidents from this, you know, incredibly aggressive activist group that now really is running the medical and scientific professions. So I would ask, how did that happen? But I'm assuming it happens the same way it's happening in every other field. There's some bullying going on in the field. Is that kind of how they're getting thrown out? It seems like, how do you throw out a world eminent, you know, doctor? Right. That's exactly right. You accuse him of being a transphobe. So there were a number of doctors, right? So, for instance, Ken Zucker tried to deliver a speech at WPATH. This man is a giant in the field. He literally oversaw the writing of the entry of gender dysphoria for the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. He was the chair of the committee to oversee the writing of that, you know, that dictionary entry effectively for what this disorder was. His talk was canceled when he was invited to give a talk at WPATH, which is the transgender health organization. I mean, these, you know, it does. It's happened the same way it's happened everywhere through intimidation, bullying and cancellation. So, obviously, we have this astronomical rise in gender dysphoria among girls here in the U.S. And I have heard that they have a similar phenomenon in the U.K. Is this happening only in Western countries or is this a global phenomenon? Where is this happening? So it's all across the West, wherever there's social media, right? So it's all it really is across the West. And in fact, in England, they're able to track the numbers better than we are because, of course, they have socialized and centralized run health care. So it's easier for them to see the numbers rise. And there they had a four thousand four hundred percent rise in young women presenting with so-called gender dysphoria at their clinics. So very, very high numbers. We see it in Sweden and other other countries as well. Two percent of girls in their teens, United States. I mean, that's millions, it seems like. So the most recent CDC numbers were two percent of high school students. So you're talking about, you know, hundreds of thousand kids. But I think it's much, much higher. And the reason I believe it's much, much higher is when I did my. So that was based on slightly older data that the report came out in 2018, but it was based on earlier data in high school. And when I did my investigation, I was hearing about middle schools. All of a sudden you would see 15, 20 percent of the girls in the class announcing they were transgender. So I think it's clear that it's moved to younger kids, especially with all the gender ideology in the schools. And I expect those numbers actually are much, much higher than even the CDC is aware of. Wow. Well, Abigail, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you tell us where we can find you? Sure. My Twitter handle is Abigail Shrier and I have a sub stack as well. So those are probably the best ways to reach me. Again, Abigail, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. Make sure to go out and buy Abigail's book, Irreversible Damage, The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. And that's the end of today's office hours. Tune in next week for a conversation with a new PragerU presenter. I'm Georgia Howe. Thanks for tuning in.