"Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria" Part 2: Panic! At The Endocrinologist.

Summary

Maintenance Phase: "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria" Part 2: Panic! At The Endocrinologist

Hosts: Aubrey Gordon & Michael Hobbes
Release Date: June 18, 2024

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Introduction

In the second part of their deep dive into the controversial concept of Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes continue to dissect the narratives, studies, and legislative actions surrounding this debated phenomenon. This episode, titled "Panic! At The Endocrinologist," critically examines the validity of ROGD, the methodologies of supporting studies, and the broader implications for transgender healthcare.

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Recap of Part 1

Timestamp [02:11] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey begins by summarizing the previous episode, where they introduced ROGD as a narrative that gained traction through transphobic message boards and parent testimonials. The hosts highlighted how this concept entered mainstream discourse despite lacking substantial empirical evidence.

Timestamp [04:00] - Michael Hobbs:
Michael emphasizes that the initial studies cited to support ROGD were methodologically flawed, relying heavily on biased parent surveys from anti-trans websites. He likens the situation to a "bizarre human centipede story," where parents erroneously speculate that their children are influenced by societal factors rather than genuinely experiencing gender dysphoria.

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Debunking "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria"

Examination of Lisa Lippman's Study

Timestamp [04:19] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey discusses Lisa Lippman's 2018 study, which was the first to present ROGD in a more formal academic setting. The study involved an anonymous survey of parents from anti-trans websites, highlighting their perceptions rather than objective measures of their children's experiences.

Timestamp [05:22] - Aubrey Gordon:
"81% of the parents answered affirmatively that their child's announcement of being transgender came, 'out of the blue.'"

Timestamp [07:27] - Michael Hobbs:
Michael critiques the study, pointing out its inherent biases and the lack of representative sampling. He notes that the study only reports on parent perceptions, not the children's actual experiences or feelings.

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Critique of J. Michael Bailey's "Fucksaw" Study

Introduction to J. Michael Bailey

Timestamp [28:55] - Michael Hobbs:
The hosts introduce J. Michael Bailey, a controversial figure in sex research, notorious for his outdated and dismissive views on transgender identities. They reference his infamous "Fucksaw" incident, where he inappropriately demonstrated a sexual device during a lecture, highlighting his lack of professionalism and understanding.

Timestamp [29:34] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey expresses disgust over Bailey's work, emphasizing how his rhetoric dehumanizes transgender individuals.

Timestamp [32:01] - Michael Hobbs:
Bailey's study attempts to perpetuate ROGD by associating transgender identities with fetishistic motives. The hosts dismantle these claims, asserting that such views are baseless and harmful.

Timestamp [37:30] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey sarcastically remarks, "That's our guy," underscoring Bailey's disreputable stance within the academic community.

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Examination of the CAS Review and Legislative Impacts

Overview of the CAS Review

Timestamp [69:10] - Michael Hobbs:
Michael introduces the 2024 CAS Review conducted by the UK, which aimed to investigate claims of children being rushed into gender-affirming care. The review found no substantial evidence supporting the idea that transgender youth are being coerced into medical transitions.

Findings Highlighted by Hosts

Timestamp [74:03] - Michael Hobbs:
The audit revealed that between 2018 and 2023, only a small fraction of children referred to gender clinics received puberty blockers or hormones. Specifically, "Only 11% of their kids ended up getting hormones," highlighting the stringent gatekeeping processes in place.

Timestamp [86:47] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey reads from the CAS Report, emphasizing that trans youth are first and foremost children who require compassionate and individualized care, not adversarial treatment based on unfounded fears.

---

Legislative Assaults and Their Consequences

State-Level Bans on Gender-Affirming Care

Timestamp [62:27] - Aubrey Gordon:
The hosts outline the wave of legislation across 21 states banning transgender youth from participating in sports, 11 states prohibiting LGBT content in schools, and measures restricting transgender individuals' access to bathrooms matching their gender identity.

Timestamp [66:07] - Michael Hobbs:
Michael discusses Florida's aggressive laws criminalizing the provision of gender-affirming care to minors, citing Lisa Lippman's study as a flawed justification. He criticizes the misuse of such studies to enact oppressive laws.

Timestamp [70:22] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey highlights the CAST Report, noting its lack of new information and the problematic qualifications of its authors. She underscores how legislative actions are being driven by ideologically motivated, rather than evidence-based, concerns.

---

Impact on Transgender Youth and Healthcare

Consequences of Misinformation

Timestamp [78:01] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey laments the moral panic driven by ROGD narratives, stating, "People are not getting healthcare that they urgently need."

Timestamp [80:52] - Michael Hobbs:
Michael argues that the increase in transgender youth seeking care correlates with greater societal acceptance, debunking the notion of a "social contagion." He emphasizes that consistent gatekeeping mechanisms ensure that only those genuinely seeking help receive it.

Timestamp [86:03] - Aubrey Gordon:
Aubrey reads from the CAST Report, emphasizing the need for high-quality, individualized care rather than baseless adversarial policies. She points out that these narratives often ignore the real struggles transgender youth face.

---

Notable Quotes

• Aubrey Gordon [05:22]:
  "81% of the parents answered affirmatively that their child's announcement of being transgender came, 'out of the blue.'"

• Michael Hobbs [06:09]:
  "The study is very useful... it’s a portrait of parental anxieties."

• Aubrey Gordon [86:12]:
  "The review heard concerns from many parents about their child being socially transitioned and affirmed in their expressed gender without parental involvement."

• Michael Hobbs [88:35]:
  "This rapid onset gender dysphoria narrative is central to the passage of these laws in Florida."

---

Conclusion

In "Panic! At The Endocrinologist," Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes meticulously deconstruct the ROGD narrative, exposing the flawed methodologies of supporting studies and the resultant legislative backlash against transgender youth. They argue that the rise in transgender healthcare referrals is a natural outcome of increased societal acceptance and better visibility, not a result of social contagion or coercion. The hosts emphasize the urgent need to protect transgender youth from oppressive laws and misinformation, advocating for evidence-based, compassionate healthcare practices.

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Disclaimer: This summary presents the viewpoints expressed by Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes in the podcast episode. It aims to accurately reflect the content discussed and does not endorse or refute the opinions presented.

Transcript

[Michael Hobbs]

Yo, dude, smoothies are such.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Welcome to Mike's Hot Takes, dude. What are you talking about, buddy?

[Michael Hobbs]

They lied to. Everyone is telling me to drink smoothies. They're like. Because, you know, I, like, drink too much coffee in the morning, and then I go to the gym, and then I'm, like, dead tired. I'm just like a black hole for, like, three hours.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

And be like, try a smoothie instead of breakfast. And so now I'm drinking smoothies, and I drink a smoothie, and then like, 30 minutes later, I'm fucking starving.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No, smoothies are delicious.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, they're great.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The idea that they're going to stay with you is false.

[Michael Hobbs]

We're back to my beefs with soup and salad. What's the point of this? I want to be done eating. I want to go do things other than eating.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Do you want to go grab a spoon of peanut butter now?

[Michael Hobbs]

No, I think it's the. Actually, I think I'm. I think I'm at my best when I'm only running on, like, coffee Tums and Wellbutrin.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I did see a sticker this weekend that just said, at my best when I'm at my worst. Oh, that's pretty funny. I feel like that is what you described.

[Michael Hobbs]

Well, maybe we have a tagline. Maybe we have a tagline. Maybe that's it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No, I got a tagline for us. Don't worry.

[Michael Hobbs]

You thought about it. You thought about it in advance.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I thought about it while I was falling asleep, so it might be terrible.

[Michael Hobbs]

All right, give it to me.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Sack Cass Report.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wait, what?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Are we not talking about the Cass Report?

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, God. Jesus Christ. Okay, no more before you go to bed, Aubrey. No more dream journal fucking taglines.

[Aubrey Gordon]

No more thinking of it in advance.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, my God. You know what? We're trying. We're doing our best.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Are we? Is that our best?

[Michael Hobbs]

I am Michael Hobbs.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I am Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do [e-mail] maintenancephase Michael.

[Michael Hobbs]

Aubrey.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Today we're continuing our conversation about rapid onset gender dysphoria. Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes. So, Aubrey, do you want to recap us on what we learned last episode?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Rapid onset gender dysphoria made its way into the news cycle sounding very legitimate and diagnostic and so on and so forth. But last time, we learned that its origin was in basically, like, transphobic message boards.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And that the primary sort of storytellers around this were parents who appeared to be having a profoundly transphobic response or at the very least, like, high levels of discomfort.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

With their own kids having come out as trans.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes. Last week's episode was essentially a bizarre human centipede story where there's these parents whose kids come out as trans to them and they essentially speculate, oh, I don't think she's really trans. I think she's being pied pipered by the Internet and her peers and the culture around her. And so, uh, I'm just gonna assume that this is some sort of like, fake temporary thing and if I resist it long enough, she will drop it. And despite there being essentially no evidence for this, this narrative starts to appear in the mainstream media eventually. We have a poster abstract in an academic journal where a researcher named Lisa Lippman does what looks like an exploration of this phenomenon, but it's actually just a survey of the same pretty small number of parents. So that doesn't really tell us anything about the phenomenon itself. It only tells us about the perceptions and beliefs of these parents.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I would be very upset if there was research into gay people and the way that they got their data was by, like asking James Dobson, why didn't you ask the gay people who were right there, huh?

[Michael Hobbs]

So we are now going to doodle back to 2018. This is the first time we get mainstream, quote, unquote evidence for rapid onset gender dysphoria. This is the publication of the full version of that very, very brief study we talked about last episode by Lisa Lippmann. This is basically just an anonymous survey of a bunch of parents. Lisa Lippmann posted recruitment advertisements on these three anti trans websites, asked parents to fill out this survey, and then they filled it out. There's 90 questions. That's it. That's the whole study.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Gotcha.

[Michael Hobbs]

So there's going to be a lot of debate and discourse about this article which we will get into. But one of the most striking things about going back to the research for this episode is how almost all of the documents that this movement cites as part of its kind of evidence base for this narrative, how just openly low rent and transphobic they are.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, God.

[Michael Hobbs]

So we are going to read some excerpts from this study. This is an excerpt from the results section where she is talking about, about parents describing the experience of hearing their kids come out to them as trans.

[Aubrey Gordon]

81% of the parents answered affirmatively that their child's announcement of being transgender came, quote, out of the blue. Without significant prior evidence of gender dysphoria. Almost a third of respondents noted that their child did not seem gender dysphoric. When they made their announcement.

[Michael Hobbs]

This one's so weird, dude. It's like, oh, they didn't. They didn't seem like they had gender dysphoria when they told me they're trans.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Did you believe it?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, I know.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Did they really sell it?

[Michael Hobbs]

I didn't seem gay when I told my parents I was gay. That's not. That's not really for them to decide.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This goes back to the post that we read last time around. Right. Which is just, like, they didn't seem like they were deeply unhappy and tortured by their own body, like, whatever it was. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

People are looking for, like, a deep sense of suffering.

[Michael Hobbs]

Also, I was lying. I. I did seem gay when I told my parents I was gay.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You seemed gay. At every moment I see, at every.

[Michael Hobbs]

Moment of my family photo that I've.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Seen.

[Michael Hobbs]

I can hear our parents budding. And you seemed real gay. You actually did seem super gay. Like, all right.

[Aubrey Gordon]

69% of respondents believed that their child was using language that they found online when they, quote, unquote, came out, come.

[Michael Hobbs]

Out in scare quotes. I had never seen that before I started researching this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, man. This was all over our many, many, many anti LGBT testimonies.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, coming out. Yeah, totally.

[Michael Hobbs]

God.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Of the 51 responses describing reasons why respondents thought their child was reproducing language they found online, the top two reasons were that it didn't sound like their child's voice and that the parent later looked online and recognized the same words and phrases that their child used when they announced a transgender identity. One parent said, quote, it seemed different from the way she usually talked. I remember thinking it was like hearing someone who had memorized a lot of definitions for a vocabulary test. Another respondent said, the email my child sent to me read, like, all the narratives posted online almost word for word.

[Michael Hobbs]

The obvious explanation here is that, like, if your parents are kind of conservative or a little bit anti trans, you're gonna Google, like, things to say to them for the coming out process.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Also, like, maybe that's something you come across in looking to talk to your parents about it. It also might be stuff that you come across in, like, figuring out your own identity stuff.

[Michael Hobbs]

Totally.

[Aubrey Gordon]

There are lots and lots of ways that this could come to be that don't mean, like, oh, no, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

[Michael Hobbs]

I actually think the study is very useful and very interesting because it's a portrait of parental anxieties.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

It says in these respondent answers. It says it mirrors language that I found online afterwards. So it's like their kids come out to them as trans. They then immediately go on the Internet and they're like, where's she getting this stuff? They basically self radicalize, right? They find these videos, they find tumblrs, they find other things online. And then they start thinking that their kid is like some sort of automaton. My kid has been taken from me.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I feel completely hooked on this idea of like, what does it mean to say something gender dysphorically.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Ah, yes. That is a statement of gender dysphoria. Got it.

[Michael Hobbs]

She was doing the John Wayne voice the whole time she told us. Seems a little. She kept saying pardoner. I don't know why she did that. So we're gonna read one more excerpt and like, this is. This is just unbelievable.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Okay, okay. The groups targeted for mocking by the friend groups are often heterosexual people and non transgender people. Sometimes animosity was also directed towards males, white people, gay and lesbian, non transgender people, aromantic and asexual people, and quote, unquote, terfs.

[Michael Hobbs]

Don't respond. Don't respond.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Quote, unquote me. The writer of this study, one participant explained, quote, they are constantly putting down straight white people for being privileged, dumb and boring.

[Michael Hobbs]

Boring.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Another participant elaborated, in general, cisgendered people are considered evil and unsupportive regardless of their actual views on the topic.

[Michael Hobbs]

I fucking love this. Regardless of their actual views. They call you transphobic regardless of what you believe. What do you believe? My daughter's not trans, definitely.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Well, to be heterosexual, comfortable with the gender you were assigned at birth, and non minority places you in the most evil of categories with this group of friends. Statement of opinions by the evil CIS gendered population are considered phobic and discriminatory and are generally discounted as unenlightened. Another participant said, quote, I hear them disparaging heterosexuality, marriage and nuclear families.

[Michael Hobbs]

What?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Another participant said on my daughter's Tumblr blog, she has liked or favorited or reposted disparaging comments about those who aren't transgender or seem to misunderstand the transgender identity. Boy, if you are digging through your kids, Tumblr likes, dude, that's.

[Michael Hobbs]

That's exactly where my brain went. I was like, this is a level of like, self radicalization that is really alarming.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Later in this paper, it says also as evidence that, you know, my daughter's being taken from me or whatever, says she edited her diary.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I was just about to make a diary joke about like, yeah, she thinks I'M invading her privacy, which I wouldn't know if I didn't have to read her diary all the time.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

If you're looking for someone who's being radicalized on the Internet, may I introduce you to a mirror? No.

[Michael Hobbs]

I mean, that's also. The social contagion thing is also fascinating too. Right. Because it's clear that these parents are like, whipping each other up and like, you know, they're posting, you know, quote unquote research that shows that, like, trans people don't really have high suicide rates, blah, blah, blah. Some of these stories from the parents are like, honestly very sad. It's like these parents who essentially choose like online forums over their relationships with their own kids, a lot of them are just not in contact with their kids anymore because they can't handle just saying we love you no matter what.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I actually think there's something a little bit more insidious even than like, they're positing that all trans identities are fake. That's not what they're positing. They're positing that all trans identities are subject to the approval of CIS people.

[Michael Hobbs]

So this is actually the explicit project of this study. I am going to send you an excerpt from the conclusion.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The conclusion of this exploratory study is that clinicians need to be very cautious before relying solely on self report when adolescents and young adults seek social, medical or surgical transition. Adolescents and young adults are not trained medical professionals. When they diagnose their own symptoms based on what they read on the Internet and hear from their friends, it is quite possible for them to reach incorrect conclusions. It is the duty of the clinician when seeing a new adolescent or young adult patient seeking transition, to perform their own evaluation and differential diagnosis to determine if the patient is correct or incorrect in their self assessment of their symptoms and their conviction that they would benefit.

[Michael Hobbs]

From transition if a patient is correct or incorrect in their self assessment. It also says, this is a couple paragraphs later. The patient's history being significantly different than their parents account of the child's history should be seen as a red flag that a more thorough investigation is needed.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This was an entry point to weakening abortion protections in the US was parental notification.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And that's essentially what they're advocating here, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's actually good for these kids if you out them to their parents who they probably haven't told for a fucking reason.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's also the thing that we see in a lot of reactionary movements where the demands of the reactionaries are things that are already in place. Right. They're like, we think kids should be assessed before they get hormones and surgery. It's like, yes, they are.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

The barriers to getting hormones and surgery as a minor are extremely high, and you can't transition without parental permission already.

[Aubrey Gordon]

All of this really hinges on the idea that, like, legal minors who are transgender have an undue amount of social power and influence and need to be checked.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. We're sick of coddling these trans kids as a society.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Too much. Enough is enough.

[Michael Hobbs]

But then, okay, but then my favorite thing about this study, not only just how kind of like on his face, janky it is, is like essentially every other study of this kind, While trying to generate evidence of rapid onset gender dysphoria, it ends up generating evidence of the opposite. So as one of the questions to these parents, it's like, when did your kid come out? Did your kid go to a gender clinic? Did your kid change their hairstyle? Blah, blah, blah. So there's 256 parents who fill out this survey. Only 11% of their kids ended up getting hormones, 2.7% ended up getting puberty blockers, and 2% ended up having surgery. So if it were the case that people are tricking doctors into giving them this care, if it were the case that doctors themselves were like, tractor beaming kids through all these medical procedures, we would see way more than 10, 15% of kids getting gender affirming care.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I also think this is where it reveals the whole sort of endeavor, reveals itself to be less about concern and more about concern. Trolling, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's certainly not about the ins and outs of what health insurance covers.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, no one.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Or what doctors are permitted to do or any of that kind of stuff. This is all just ways of, like, eating around the edges of, like, a much bigger thing that they're trying to eliminate, which is healthcare for trans people.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. This is also. I mean, this episode, like all episodes that we do, is a extended subtweet of Brexit. And this is exactly what happened with Brexit too. They're like, all we're asking for is, like, a slightly updated arrangement. And then, like, every single time they get what they want, they just push it farther and farther and farther. And they've ended up with, like, the hardest imaginable Brexit. And, like, you can't negotiate with people who are not actually saying things in good faith. They're saying what they know you will agree to. And the minute you agree to it, they'll push you to the next Quote, unquote, reasonable ask. And that's what's happened in, like, the uk. I was going to say something specific, but it's just the UK at this point.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, the whole thing. The whole thing. All of it.

[Michael Hobbs]

So this article comes out in August of 2018. In November of this year, Lisa Lippman, the author of the paper, presents it at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. And there's a description of her presentation, which we're only reading because I think it's extremely funny.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Following Dr. Littman's presentation, there was no applause. Got her. Okay. Following Dr. Littman's presentation, there was no applause before several audience members launched into questions. Some were more civil than others, but pretty much all were critical. One audience member pointedly asked Dr. Littman what she had previously studied in her research. OB, GYN, public health issues, and whether she has worked with any transgender patients in the past. She has not.

[Michael Hobbs]

Narrator voice, Narrator voice her.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Another questioner at the end repeatedly asked her, why did you do this study? And what. What's wrong with taking on a different gender identity? To which she would only say that we should keep open the possibility that there may be social contagion occurring.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, I love. I love that. The questions are just like, why? What? Why? Why are you doing this? Mueller's like, sputtering.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What if it's neutral? But what if it's happening because of social contagion? You're just describing, like, fashion at this point. Wow. We may be. Why else would people be wearing cargo pants right now?

[Michael Hobbs]

So I think this is a good summary of the kind of academic response to this. And before you know it, there start to be more formal methodological critiques in various journals. So the main thing is that Littman is trying to identify a phenomenon among kids that doesn't interview any kids. So just as a starting point, that is, like, pretty janky. And then secondly, we've got the parents who were recruited from anti Trans website. So it's not a remotely representative sample.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

And then it's even worse than that. So when Lippmann recruits participants, you have to get, like, a consent form from everybody where it's like, you. You sort of. This is what the study's about and you, like, sign it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

And so in the consent form for this study, participants are told, you are being asked to take part in a research study. If you have a child who, when they were between the ages of 10 and 21, developed a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, this may have occurred in the context of either in increase social media Internet use and or belonging to a friend group in which one or multiple friends have developed gender dysphoria and come out as transgender during a similar timeframe. So basically, this is the conclusion of the study being used on the consent form before people fill out the questionnaire.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Another way of putting this is, did your kid recently come out and have they found community among their peers?

[Michael Hobbs]

So there's lots of discourse around this. There's open letters, there's petitions, there's lots of debate after this article comes out. And eventually, on March 19, 2019, the journal that published the paper republishes it. So they issue a statement that says, correcting the scientific record on gender incongruence and an apology where they say, in discussion with two academic editors, a statistics reviewer, and an academic who treats gender incongruence in adolescence, we've reached the conclusion that the study and resultant data reported in the article represent a valid contribution to the scientific literature. However, we have also determined that the study, including its goals, methodology, and conclusions, were not adequately framed in the published version and that these needed to be corrected. The changes include revisions of key sections such as Title and Abstract, which required us to republish the paper. This is a pretty big deal and, like, doesn't happen all that often, right? That the changes are so meaningful that they have to change the title and the abstract.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

So the previous title of the paper, the original title, was Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Young Adults A Study of Parental Reports. And the updated title is Parent Reports of Adolescent and Young Adults Perceived to Show Signs of a Rapid Onset of Gender Dysphoria.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yep.

[Michael Hobbs]

What I find so frustrating about this is that Lippmann herself and a lot of conservatives do, like this weird victory lap about this statement. We've reached the conclusion that the study and the resultant data represent a valid contribution to the scientific literature. Like the thing they say before the. But essentially because oftentimes what you see, what you see, like, in kind of debates about this, in, like, Reply Guy world, is that you're like, yeah, the study's, like, discredited. And then people will be like, well, it wasn't retracted.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Well, okay, this is like a movie poster where the quote from a critic is just, like, watchable.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It is so damned with faint praise.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's also an unbelievably tedious thing where originally Brown University, where Lisa Lippmann was employed, puts out a press release saying, like, our researcher has a study that found these things. And after these major corrections to the paper, Brown then deletes the press release from its website because there's all this outcry. And the president of Brown releases a statement saying, we respect the academic freedom of everybody who works at Brown. We don't want to spread messages that might cause harm to the transgender community. We're leaving up the study. We're not retracting the study. We're not deleting it from anything. We're just deleting the press release.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Ultimately, I don't know, relatively minor thing, but the right goes ballistic. Ben Shapiro writes a piece for the Daily Wire called, A Brown University researcher released a study about teens imitating their peers by turning trans. The left went insane. So Brown caved.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The left went insane.

[Michael Hobbs]

Quillette has. As a former dean of Harvard Medical School, I question Brown's failure to defend Lisa Lippmann. They did defend her.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Fox News has Brown U censors gender dysphoria study worried that findings might invalidate the perspectives of transgender community. The study. You can go look at the study and read the study. Nothing has been censored. But I think this Brown University little dust up thing is indicative of one of the big shifts that starts happening over the course of the next couple of years after 2019, is that the anti trans movement starts to become increasingly conspiratorial. This whole kind of narrative, when you think about it, it already kind of is a conspiracy theory in that it requires you to believe hundreds of doctors are giving these irreversible procedures to kids with no assessment because they're like, so blinded by their, like, SJW trans ideology that like, they don't even care.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

You know, you're already in a conspiracy mindset. And then this whole thing of like, Brown University censored the research and the trans activists are coming after us. It creates this thing that we see in other conspiracy theories where everything becomes about like these meta debates about, like, you can't even ask the questions anymore. When you look at sort of anti trans rhetoric and these organizations of parents or whoever it is, they spend a huge amount of time on, like, she tried to publish her research, but then it was censored. Whether or not it was censored is kind of irrelevant to whether or not the narrative holds up on the merits. Right. Like, people's work can be censored for political reasons, but it can also be censored because it's bad. Right. Like research on flat earth also gets censored. Yeah, this actually appears in a later interview with one of the people who's kind of leading this crusade. He says researchers who have touched this topic have been punished for their curiosity. Just ask Lisa Lippmann. Ultimately, her paper on the subject resulted in unnecessary correction by the journal that published it and the loss of Lippmann's academic affiliation with Brown University, which prioritized activist outrage over Lippmann's academic freedom.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Wait, did she get fired?

[Michael Hobbs]

No, she left. She left to go do anti trans advocacy all the time. I found, like, her tweet announcing it. She says, I'm thrilled to announce my excellent colleagues and I are launching a nonprofit research organization to study gender dysphoria. I will be leaving Brown University and appreciate the time I spent there. If you had good evidence, you would just be telling me the evidence and, like, sending me citations. But the fact that you keep changing the subject to this, like, meta stuff is just, like, a little bit suspicious.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It has the tenor of, like, a TikTok video where it just cuts into, like, some lady screaming like, you're impinging my First Amendment rights. And you're like, we can have a conversation about this, but I'm guessing there's some other stuff going on here.

[Michael Hobbs]

Or the anti mask weirdos on, like, planes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Hitler made them wear masks before. Okay, yeah, like, and then the other.

[Michael Hobbs]

The other, like, I think very noticeable conspiratorial element among these rapid onset gender dysphoria boosters is that, like, there's a total refusal to engage with all of the counter evidence. So in the years after this paper is corrected, there's actual studies, like, actual surveys of trans kids that completely fail to confirm this diagnosis. One of the things we noticed in the anti vax episodes was that, like, if anti vax narratives were true, it would actually be very easy to tell. You would be able to say, like, oh, they changed the vaccine schedule in, like, Michigan. And then, like, one year later, there was a massive spike in autism cases. And it's kind of the same thing with rapid onset gender dysphoria, that if there was this massive wave of kids showing up to gender clinics who, you know, a week ago they saw a transition video and now they say they're trans or they have a lot of trauma and they're thinking they're trans as, like, a coping mechanism or whatever, we would actually see that in the data and clinicians would see this too, and it would show up in studies.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

So there's a survey of 173 trans youth across 10 different clinics. In Canada. That concludes controlling for age and sex assigned at birth, recent gender knowledge was not significantly associated with depressive symptoms, psychological distress, past diagnoses with mental health issues or neurodevelopment disorders, gender dysphoria symptoms, self harm, past year, suicide attempt, having gender supportive online friends, general support from online friends or transgender friends or transgender support from parents. We also have, like, much larger surveys. So in 2023, we get a survey of 27,000 participants where 40% of trans people say that they realized that they were trans in adolescence. It doesn't mean they're bewitched. It doesn't mean they saw it on TikTok. It doesn't mean that they're not trans. It's just like a different way of discovering themselves. It's just not the case that we have a bunch of kids who are essentially confused and they see something on the Internet and the next day they tell their parents, I'm trans. And the next week they tell the doctor, I'm trans. And then the week after that they're getting surgery.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I will say I remember the gender confusion as the lead message sort of era.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

One of the reasons that I recall it so vividly is that we had a volunteer leadership summit at one point and trans woman attended wearing a T shirt that just said, I'm not confused. But you seem to be.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, that's good. That's very good.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is all shit that you come to when you're looking for reasons to disbelieve your kid when they tell you that they are trans. Right. That you're like, oh, the timing of it is wrong. The onset was too rapid, or I didn't, I didn't see you. I didn't observe you as being deeply, deeply unhappy or, you know, emotionally distraught about your gender.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. And it's. To me, it's just like, so telling that. It's like the minute somebody asks actual trans people, they're like, oh, that's not my experience at all.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

That probably should just be like the end of the debate then. Right. Rather than asking more people who are not trans kids and would have no way of knowing what the subjective experience of trans adolescence is. But then in 2023, we get another attempt to prove that rapid onset gender dysphoria exists. I know this one's even worse, but we're not going to spend as much time on it. So this one is called rapid onset gender dysphoria. Parent reports on 1655 possible cases. So one of the co authors of this is someone named J. Michael Bailey, who. I don't know how else to put this. He's basically just like a disgraced sex researcher. So the scandal with him is all around his 2003 book called the man who Would Be the Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Uh. Oh.

[Michael Hobbs]

Where. I know he's. We're just gonna read it. I was gonna try to preface this. I went to his website, and it has, like, an excerpt of his book.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I just like that we got the belabored sigh before you even said anything. Like, you just. You couldn't even start a sentence without just being like.

[Michael Hobbs]

I thought, like, what can I tell Aubrey about this guy? But, like, I think I'm doing a show don't tell thing. So this is.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, got it.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is, I believe, the first, like, five paragraphs of his book. And he. This is on his website. This is not, like, leaked secret documents. This is. This is something he has put out as, like. This is an exemplar of my work.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The most expert cosmetic salesperson at the local upscale department store is a man. A female friend told me about him, and intrigued, I went to see him. He was young, tall, and African American, and his head was shaven. His fingernails were long and covered with clear nail polish. I watched him as he helped a woman choose the right makeup. After he was done with her, I introduced myself. He was slightly taken aback that I, a psychologist, wanted to meet him.

[Michael Hobbs]

What, I don't know.

[Aubrey Gordon]

But he also appeared slightly flattered. He told me his name was Edwin. Edwin is a feminine man, one of the most feminine men I have ever met. I do not ask Edwin about his childhood because I do not need to. I already know that Edwin played with dolls and loathed football, that his best friends were girls. There is some chance that if I ever see Edwin again, his name and appearance will be changed to those of a woman. Even for a gay man, Edwin's appearance and manner are exceedingly feminine. He would stand out in a gay bar, but he'd receive little romantic attention there. First of all, how do you know?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. What is this weird dig at Edwin?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, God.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. I mean. I mean, gay men are, like, misogynistic as fuck on this stuff. But, like, when straight people talk about this shit, I'm like, take Edwin's name out of your mouth.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Also, femmes are getting laid. Don't worry about it.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wait, I have to take off my carpal tunnel splints. Hang on, hang on. Femmes are getting laid. Femmes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

He is near the boundary of Male and female, and someday he may cross it. If he does, one primary motive will be lust. One cannot understand transsexualism without studying transsexual sexuality. Transsexuals lead remarkable sex lives. Those who love men become women to attract them. Jesus Christ, dude, I know. Those who love women become the women they love. Although transsexuals are cultural hot commodities right now, writers have either been too shallow or too squeamish to give transsexual sexuality the attention it deserves. No longer. Also, like, trans writers have not been too shallow or too squeamish to write about transsexuality. That's been happening for a long time.

[Michael Hobbs]

Write about it, dude. This is the. This is the excerpt he put on his own website.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is like.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is the work that he's proud of.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sight, your one primary motive for transition is lust for the stranger that you fucking met at Sephora.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, you gotta see. You gotta see this homo working. It's working at the mall.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Who, by the way, exists at every Sephora. What are we doing?

[Michael Hobbs]

J. Michael Bailey is, like, fairly open about the fact that he thinks there's only two kinds of transgender people, and one of them is basically gay dudes. They want to get men and they can't get them as a man, so they become a trans woman so they can get men. And then the other kind of transgender people is autogynephilic transsexuals, People who basically are turned on by the idea of themselves being women, right? So basically, like, they're sex perverts. It gives them a boner to, like, dress up in women's clothes and, like, live as a woman. And they're only doing it for this, like, lifelong fetish.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is the Buffalo Bill of it all.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes, yes, yes, exactly. And so, like, I mean, this is like the kind of rhetoric that you got in, like, the fucking 50s and 60s. And he's publishing this book in 2003 and he's still saying this shit now. He now has revised this to say that there's three kinds of trans people. And the third one is rapid onset gender dysphoria.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is. You are now turning into Brian Cox in succession, looking to anti trans movements, saying, you are not serious people.

[Michael Hobbs]

Exactly, exactly. But then. Okay, so the other reason we're talking about J. Michael Bailey is that one of the first steps of researching this guy was to go to his Wikipedia page. And mostly it's like a normal Wikipedia page. It has, like, career stuff. It has, you know, information about these various scandals. And so I'm scrolling and scrolling, and then I get to the final section of his Wikipedia page, which is the fucksaw incident.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What?

[Michael Hobbs]

And I was like, Mike, you have 180 pages of notes. Don't open a bunch of other tabs. Don't find out what the fuck the fucksaw incident was. But come on, I didn't have the strength.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You and I know why we do this show.

[Michael Hobbs]

I didn't have the strength.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Finding out about fuck saws is a non zero factor, okay?

[Michael Hobbs]

And then all day I'm thinking about it, I'm like, what is the fuck saw incident? What is it?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Also, I would just say anything involving a fuck saw is an incident by definition.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's not like a quiet evening with.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The fucksaw Sunday afternoon.

[Michael Hobbs]

What the fuck saw?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, no, Michael, I might be destroyed.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay, do you want to know what the fuck saw incident was?

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't know if I can take it.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay, yeah. Okay, tell me. So 2011, he's a teacher at Northeastern, and he teaches about, like, sexuality. He does, like, sexuality classes. And so he's doing, like, an optional lecture on kink, like the kink community. And so he brings in two kinky people. I thought the Fuck Saw was gonna be a joke name or something that a student came up with. This is what the kink performers call it. So it's a saw, Like a saw blade, you know, that you use for home construction. But if you take off the saw and you put on a dildo, then it's like a dildo going in and out. I'm doing this with my hand right now. You can't see it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sure.

[Michael Hobbs]

So it's like a jackhammer. It's like a dildo jackhammer, basically. And so apparently they're having this class and they're describing having sex with this woman with the fucksaw. And one of them is like, you know, we actually have the fucksaw with us right now. Should we demonstrate this?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, hello, students. I happen to have my fuck saw on me.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's in my Civic outside. Give me a second.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I brought it to school.

[Michael Hobbs]

Then they go out and they get the fuck saw.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I love this.

[Michael Hobbs]

This man, like, uses the fucksaw on this woman and brings her to, like, numerous orgasms.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is made up.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is fucking real.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is real.

[Michael Hobbs]

And this becomes, like, a whole big thing. And, like, the whole country is, like, clowning on this professor who, like, let this happen. Because apparently they were like, is this cool? And he's like, yeah, yeah, whatever. We're all adults here. There's eventually an interview with him in Salon where they're like, what? What is like the deal with this whole outcry? And he's saying like, it's not a big deal because it's like an optional lecture. All the kids in college are adults. And he says it took no more than 10 minutes of the hour long presentation. So it's one fucking sixth amazing of ten minutes of this woman just having orgasm after orgasm.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Watching somebody have sex in a lecture hall for 10 minutes is a long amount of time.

[Michael Hobbs]

It sounds so boring, honestly, after the first one, like, how much Fuck Saw do we need? So that's. That's J. Michael Bailey.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus hell. That's our guy.

[Michael Hobbs]

That's our guy. That was like a weird long digression.

[Aubrey Gordon]

About the Fuck Saw.

[Michael Hobbs]

We're keeping it good.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I love that you're like, this is totally inappropriate for a university. Let's just dedicate 25 minutes of our podcast.

[Michael Hobbs]

I want it to be exactly 1/6 of our podcast the way that it was 1/6 of the lecture. Oh, I think that's fair. I want to keep structural integrity.

[Aubrey Gordon]

How many of the lecture halls full of students are we going to reach?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes. So back to the reason why we're talking about The Fucksaw, this 2023 article that is attempting to prove the existence of rapid onset gender dysphoria. One of the authors is the Fucksaw guy, J. Michael Bailey. The other author is a woman named Susanna Diaz. And the way that the study comes about is J. Michael Bailey goes to a conference organized by Susanna Diaz and he's talking to her about this website that she founded called Parents of Rogd Kids. She mentions that she has all of this data. She has a survey that she has sent to the users of this site and that is the basis of this study. So right off the bat you can tell that this has exactly the same problems as the previous study.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is just essentially a sketchy online survey and it's recruited parents who already believe in the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria. So of course they're going to report that they've seen it in their kids. That's why they're on this website. But the kind of amazing thing is that both of those factors are even worse in this study. So first of all, the data is even sketchier because Susanna Diaz is not her real name. J. Michael Bailey says that like, oh, because the trans activists were so mean to Lisa Lippmann, she has no choice but to use A pseudonym. He says my co author, Susanna Diaz doesn't go by her real name. I don't even know it. Despite having met her in person once and spoken with her many times, she uses a pseudonym to protect her family, especially her daughter, whom Susannah believes has rapid onset gender dysphoria. Yeah, this is just a lady who founded this website and then says that she surveyed people, but there's very little information about the sort of methodology and like logistics of the survey. And secondly, this website that she founded, Parents of ROGD Kids. I mean the previous study also recruited parents from these anti trans websites. This website makes 4th Wave now look like PFLAG. So if you go to the like our position, like the basic about us statement on their website, it says our position one, identifying as the opposite gender is not normal.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, good.

[Michael Hobbs]

In most cases it's a symptom of severe psychological pain or dysfunction or an attempt to resolve some other issue. Two, our children are subjected to strong cultural influences that promote transitioning. Three, the gender affirmative model is a form of conversion therapy.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What?

[Michael Hobbs]

I know, sorry, dude. This is the rhetorical equivalent of a fucksaw.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Okay, okay.

[Michael Hobbs]

Their word, fucksawing us not in the good way. Four, the current standard of care, the gender affirmative model, is unproven. Five, our gender dysphoric children, youth and adults are being experimented on. Six, the gender affirmative model prolongs suffering and causes further trauma. Seven, Professionals who accept an individual self diagnosis and propose medical intervention are negligent.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus Christmas.

[Michael Hobbs]

Eight, Medical intervention for gender dysphoria should be a last resort. So this is very openly an anti trans organization.

[Aubrey Gordon]

As you know, my brain is broken in such a way that it can only be treated by recreationally watching the Montana legislature.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And this was a huge, huge, huge fight last session. Yeah, there were people making these sorts of claims about like kids are being rushed into transition and, but. And the whole time I was watching it, I was like, in Montana.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, I know, in Montana, right?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Like the places where the moral panic is the strongest are the places where it is also like, like the most disapproved of. It's just real nonsense. And it's a real dead giveaway that people are just turning off their critical thinking brains at all. They're just freaked out and their hypothalamuses are like, this is the only part of your brain that works right now.

[Michael Hobbs]

And so, so we're not gonna spend as much time on this as we did on the Lisa Lippmann survey. Mostly because this is.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Are we gonna spend as much time on it as we did on the fuck Saw? No.

[Michael Hobbs]

Mostly because this is essentially the same thing again, but, like, even jankier. So in the sort of consent form it says, who should complete this survey? You should complete this survey if your child, A, had a relatively normal childhood without showing any signs of discomfort with their gender, and B, suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, decided they identified as the opposite gender or some other quote, unquote gender.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Boy, gender in scare quotes is a new one for me. Just like the whole concept of it.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't fucking know.

[Michael Hobbs]

And then in the recruitment criteria, they say that their respondents are reporting like, they get like a median age of rapid onset gender dysphoria, and they say that the range is between three to greater than 25 years. So, like, what child at age three is doing rapid onset gender dysphoria?

[Aubrey Gordon]

True.

[Michael Hobbs]

Like, how would you like, is the three year old on TikTok?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

They say we limited subsequent analyses to parent reports on youths whose gender dysphoria was reported to begin between ages 11 and 21. So why are you including people over 18? They're not children then. Yeah, again, this guy is like such, just like so non credible to me. He says this in interviews afterwards, after this paper gets a lot of criticism. He Sundays, we identified 1655 cases of rapid onset gender dysphoria, a significant number for activists to ignore. You didn't identify cases? Yeah, these are not cases. You identified parents.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, also that whole like, for activists to ignore. I'm like, A, what are you doing? Yeah, and B, like, what else have people been ignoring? Right? Like, again, this is the, like, unlike some grocery stores, you'll never find rats.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You're sort of like trying to insinuate that anyone who is supportive of trans people is like ignoring data or willfully shutting down some kind of like more science driven conversation. But you're not making the implicit explicit. Right? You're sort of like doing these big broad gestures to be like, you know how they are. And it's like, no, you have to tell me how they are.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's then we're not gonna go into it, but there's then a whole tedious debate thing and this paper is eventually retracted. The reason why it's retracted is because they never got ethics approval.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, Jesus. Always a good fucking sign.

[Michael Hobbs]

The funny thing is too, is on the kind of broader and more substantive critiques, he's like, well, the limitations section of the paper, like, said these weren't representative, which, like, I guess. But also, you can't just publish a super shitty study and then have limitations. Be like, well, this study is super shitty. So after this happens, the paper is retracted. You then get another tedious wave of, like, someone published an article that questioned the trans orthodoxy and they were canceled. He writes like two different first person accounts, one of which for Barry Weiss's website.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You gotta give me a trigger warning before you.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know, I know it's bad.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Don't say it three times.

[Michael Hobbs]

You know the headline is, my research on gender dysphoria was censored, but I won't be.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, Lord.

[Michael Hobbs]

If rapidance at gender dysphoria was real, you would be talking about the real evidence for it. You would be pointing us to evidence. You wouldn't be talking about, like, this guy's paper was retracted. This guy's like, super jank balls. Paper was retracted.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Well, I think. I think part of, like, what's at the core of what's happening here is a thing that I thought about a lot as an organizer, which is what happens when people believe that their discomfort has to be resolved in order for other people to do other things with their own lives. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Like, you feel uncomfortable when a conversation comes up and you're nervous about becoming the new, like, Larry David of your friend group. Like, oh, no, he can't say anything. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And like, meanwhile, people are not getting health care that they urgently need.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Like, I both have a lot of empathy for folks who feel like change is happening really rapidly and I'm struggling to keep up with it and I feel really confused by it and whatever that discomfort becomes the cultural thing that we're responding to instead of like, the actual needs of actual trans youth. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

But you're very clear and, like, you can just ask them and find out what they are.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Totally. Yeah, totally.

[Michael Hobbs]

So we have the one Lisa Lippman study, which is heavily corrected. We then have this Michael Bailey fuck Saw study officially retracted. So these are the only two pieces of evidence for rapid onset gender dysphoria.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Okay.

[Michael Hobbs]

We also accidentally, during this period, get a bunch of evidence against rapid onset gender dysphoria. I'm stealing this point from Julia Serrano, who has pointed this out numerous times, that over the last couple years, the anti trans movement keeps just declaring victory and saying that they've discovered this, like, smoking gun, that all of their concerns have been proven, and every single time it ends up proving the opposite. The first one of these alleged smoking guns is a lawsuit from 2020. That's filed in the UK called Tavistock vs Bell. It is filed by two claimants. The first claimant is somebody named Kira Bell, who was a patient at England's only youth gender clinic, which we will talk about in great detail later. We're not going to go into too much detail, but I'm just going to read you a couple of choice excerpts from the timeline that is laid out in the kind of discovery fact stage of this lawsuit. So if you read the decision, these are little sentences that I'm cutting out because they're like, amidst all of the legalese, it says, when she was 15, the first claimant was referred to the Tavistock Clinic. That's the gender identity clinic. She was first seen at the Tavistock clinic aged 16, and had a number of appointments spread out over one year and nine months. She was referred to another clinic in June 2013, and after three appointments commenced puberty blockers. After commencing testosterone at 17, changes to her body commenced rapidly. And when she was 20, she had a double mastectomy and then she detransitions a couple years later. So just to lay this out really clearly, according to the timeline presented by somebody who claims she was rushed through gender affirming care, she identifies as trans. At 15. She doesn't get her first appointment at the clinic until she's 16 because there's a huge waiting list. She then has a bunch of appointments spread out over one year and nine months before she gets puberty blockers. She then starts testosterone at 17. So another year goes by and she gets a mastectomy at 20.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, five years. Big rush.

[Michael Hobbs]

This also explains why in the lawsuit they mentioned that in the previous year, the clinic only gave puberty blockers to 161 kids, which is minuscule, right? We're talking about 8 million kids between 10 and 19 in the UK as a whole. And if you compare this to antidepressants, 500,000 kids in the UK are on antidepressants. And I don't want to cast aspersions on antidepressants or whatever, but it's like you can get antidepressants after one appointment.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I feel like between this and your last episode saying your therapist called you a nervous wreck, look, that you might be telling on yourself more than you mean to, that you're like, you can get this shit in one appointment. I don't know if you know this.

[Michael Hobbs]

I was rushed into dealing with my.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Anxiety issues after a scant 40 years. I was rushed into it.

[Michael Hobbs]

It was very funny. He's like, yeah, you have Like a sort of fast talking, kind of urgent, nervous energy. Has anyone ever told you that? And I was like about 1500 people on iTunes. I can actually see reviews of my personality. You can get a second and a third and a fourth opinion if you'd like.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Only every time I talk, which I do for a living.

[Michael Hobbs]

For a living. So, okay, so that is the first claimant. So someone who was rushed through a five year process. And then the second claimant. I'm going to send you this excerpt from the lawsuit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The second claimant, Mrs. A, is the mother of a 15 year old girl who has autism Spectrum disorder. The daughter has a history of mental health and behavioral problems. She is, quote, desperate to run away from all that made her female. End quote. And has been referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, which is not.

[Michael Hobbs]

The Gender Identity Clinic, by the way. This is just like mental health for kids.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Mrs. A is very concerned that her daughter would be referred to the Tavistock Clinic and prescribed puberty blockers. However, the daughter has not currently been referred to the Tavistock Clinic and having regard to the defendant's current practice, would not meet the criteria for puberty blockers because her parents would not support that treatment. Mrs. A's interest in this action is therefore largely theoretical. This is so English in the best way. That's English. Bless your heart.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is literally just a random person. Her daughter has mental health problems. Okay. We think she might be rushed into medicalization if she was referred to this clinic, but she wasn't. Can you imagine filing a lawsuit against the Sacklers and be like, well, if I was in a motorcycle accident, I would have been prescribed opioids and then I would have gotten addicted.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I really like how close we're getting to calling this lawsuit Stolen Valor.

[Michael Hobbs]

For all the fictional people who really were rushed into treatment, this does a disservice to their sacrifice.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, pour one out.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

For all the made up people, this.

[Michael Hobbs]

Decision in which all of these facts come out actually results in banning puberty blockers for people under 16. The case is later overturned, thankfully. But this actually results in making it much harder for people to get puberty blockers after this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Puberty blockers are something that I worked on specifically.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, did you?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, absolutely. And it fits in a category that almost all sort of transition related or gender affirming care fits into, which is we already provide it to CIS people.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know.

[Aubrey Gordon]

But we're specifically denying it to trans people because they are trans. Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. There's this, like really bizarre talking point going around about puberty blockers for trans kids that, like, they're not reversible. We don't know if they're reversible. And like, the whole point of puberty blockers is that they're reversible. People take them when they're going through puberty too early, and you take them for a couple years and then you wait for like, the appropriate age to go through puberty and you stop taking them and you go through puberty. So, like, if they weren't reversible, they would not be prescribed to a few thousand cisgender kids a year. Like, the whole point of them is the reversibility.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's why people like them and seek them out.

[Michael Hobbs]

Okay, so that laws lawsuit was the first rake stepping that the anti trans movement has done where they're accidentally ginning up more evidence against their entire narrative. The second one is the Missouri Gender Clinic whistleblower. I know that you, as a scholar of my tweets, have probably been following this very closely.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Here's what comes up when I open up my fucking chrome on my computer is it has a bunch of suggested like, hey, here are places you go often. And one of them is just Michael Hobbs on Twitter.

[Michael Hobbs]

I feel like what it actually does, it opens up 75 tabs, but they're all just different photos of your dog.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's my phone. The new iOS has a thing where you can just rotate through pictures of a person or a thing or whatever. And my phone was immediately like, you got a lot of pictures of this fucking dog.

[Michael Hobbs]

Siri is like, look, I don't usually do this, but tone it down. Look, that's enough. So this woman who was an employee at a gender clinic in St. Louis, wrote an article for Bari Weiss's blog called I Thought I was Saving trans Kids. Now I'm blowing the whistle. And this was part of a kind of a media rollout that also included a sworn affidavit that she filed with the Missouri Attorney general. And in this affidavit and in this article, she basically says that, like, kids were being rushed through processes. They're barely getting seen by psychologists, and yet the doctors are like, we think you're trans. Here's some hormones. But once she files this, once it goes public, people start noticing that she's making some implausible claims in this affidavit as well. So at one point she says that a kid comes in identifying as a communist, attack helicopter, human female, maybe non binary, and was put on hormones. And I don't know if you know this, Aubrey but this thing of I'm an attack helicopter is like a really well known right wing meme. It's something that right wing people say to basically invalidate trans people. Like, oh, you identify as a woman. Well, I identify as an attack helicopter.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's all the bumper stickers that say my truck identifies as a Prius or whatever.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, it's the one fucking joke. They only have one fucking joke. Right. And so this attack helicopter thing strikes people as like, was this maybe someone who was joking? Or maybe this whistleblower, like, read it on a website and like, thought it was real or something like, something weird is going on. But then, to me, the far more implausible claim that she makes in this article and in this affidavit, she says the clinic routinely issued puberty blockers or cross sex hormones without parental consent.

[Aubrey Gordon]

If those kids are under 18. That's extraordinarily unlikely if this was true.

[Michael Hobbs]

I mean, it's a very risky strategy for this, for this clinic.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Right.

[Michael Hobbs]

Because you're opening yourself up to litigation. And there's also the question of, like, insurance and kind of the administration of the American healthcare system that someone is paying for these procedures. And so the parents are getting a bill from a gender clinic for, you know, a shot of puberty blockers every three months. And they're not noticing. Right. And also their kid is like, visibly transitioning. Yeah, totally. Every single person who, like, works in healthcare is like, I don't think so.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

As usual, this is something that of course, like, there's this big victory lap of like, we're finally, you finally have to admit that, like, these clinics are pushing kids through. But then local reporters start looking around and saying, well, okay, this person alleges that like, a ton of kids are pushed through procedures. Well, let's find some of them. Let's go talk to people. And so a local reporter finds almost two dozen parents of kids who were seen at the clinic. And every single one of them says that they don't agree with the characterization of this whistleblower at all. It took a long time and they were really thoroughly assessed and were happy with the procedures. And they even talked to some kind of like, anti trans parents who were like, yeah, we didn't think that our daughter was trans at all, but we don't think that she was rushed through anything. We think that they went really, really slow and eventually she didn't get care, partly because we weren't happy with it. So it's like they just can't find anybody. And to this Day, as far as I know, not a single individual named person has come forward and said, yes, this happened to me at this clinic. All we've had is numerous people come forward and say, no, this isn't my experience at all.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's really fascinating to me that not really anywhere in the sort of storytelling of this stuff does anyone go, hmm, I think this person might just be really uncomfortable with trans people.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as I always say, like, I'm not gonna litigate what is in this person's heart. I'm not gonna speculate about their motives or what they really believe or whatever. But in her own affidavit and in this Bari Weiss article, she routinely misgenders kids that come to this clinic.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus Christ.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's pretty really, really, really low bar.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's also just like a sign of a fucking gremlin of a person, dude.

[Michael Hobbs]

I know.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's so easy if you introduce yourself to me as Michael. Hi, my name is Michael. I wouldn't be like, Mikey M. Dog.

[Michael Hobbs]

What does your birth certificate say?

[Aubrey Gordon]

You wouldn't do that. That's weird. You're being weird.

[Michael Hobbs]

The third rake stepping. I hadn't even heard of this one before I started researching this episode. But In March of 2023, there was something called the W Path files. So WPATH is the world professional association of transgender health providers. It's basically like the AAP or the Endocrine society or whatever for, like, trans medical providers. And basically, I'm not going to go through the whole fucking 300 page document. But the introduction basically presents it as, like, we have leaked documents from inside WPATH where they're admitting that they are rushing kids through these procedures. Right. The only problem is, first of all, these are not internal WPATH chats. This is not a private forum. So our friend Evan Urquhart has, like, looked into this in more detail and found that, like, this is a professional forum where anybody can pay $225 and, like, participate in it. It's like a moderated forum for, like, health professionals.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, no. It's your voters pamphlet where you're like, look, man, for 800 bucks, anybody can put a statement in here.

[Michael Hobbs]

And then. And the other significantly larger problem is that if you actually read the evidence, like the leaked evidence, that they amass it again proves the opposite of what they're saying. So if you get to the actual leaks, like the actual text parts, where they're like, we got it. This is it. The first example of this is a doctor in Brazil posts on the forum it's kind of like a Reddit thing. He's posting a question, he says, look, I've got a patient who identifies as trans and they're 14 years old and they want genital surgery. What should I do? One of the replies is a doctor who says, I wouldn't do it. Tissue too immature, dilation routine too critical. Okay, so don't do it. Another person posts, we at GS Montreal would not undertake a surgery at 14. Genital surgery is delayed until the patient is 18. Okay. Then there's another post which is like much longer and more detailed where it's somebody saying, look, in my entire, like 30 year career as a gender affirming care practitioner, I've only done maybe like four or six genital surgeries on people under 18. And they were in like very specific circumstances. These were basically kids who wanted the surgery before they went off to college. And they wanted it to be in the summer so they could have like the recovery time and kind of start fresh in college. But like, that's something that's done with like a tremendous amount of care, and that's not something that we do lightly. And like, I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you like, really know the patient and like, definitely don't do it at 14. So someone asked, can I do surgery on a young kid? And everyone was like, no. And they just present this as if like, well, we've proven they're giving surgery to young kids.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We got them, folks.

[Michael Hobbs]

I don't think we have statistics about how many people under 18 get general surgeries. And it's like so close to zero. You might as well fucking round it down to zero. It's like, basically people are not getting these procedures under 18, so.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Michael, I'm so tired, dude.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's. It's exhausting, right? And again, you get this fucking victory lap.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It just sucks to see all this shit playing out and be like, okay, cool, so this is going to be, you know, the fabulously wealthy trans community is going to be fucking spending their money.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, no kidding.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And all their fucking advocacy time beating back this fucking bullshit.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's also so frustrating to do this, like, pretty recently after we just did this with the gay marriage debate.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Fucking honestly, it's like, do you really.

[Michael Hobbs]

Need a trans cousin? Really? We have to start from scratch with this.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's really sad and frustrating and demoralizing. And the people who are doing it really think that they are bringing up reasonable and good points.

[Michael Hobbs]

And they're forcing us to make a series of tedious podcast episodes. Talking about fucking methodology again?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, Michael's being forced constantly.

[Michael Hobbs]

I'm not doing this to win Internet beefs, Aubrey. I'm doing this for science. But then the thing is that, I mean, this is the really dark part of the episode, so please bear with me. The really sad thing about this is that despite all of this just years long rake stepping, this strategy is working. So over the last couple years, we've seen an unprecedented legislative assault on trans people. 21 states have banned trans kids in sports. 11 states have banned LGBT content in schools. 6 states have banned trans people using the bathroom they want to use. Florida just banned gender identity cards. So like, if you want to change your driver's license so it says female, they're not letting you do that anymore, which is like just an unbelievable dick move.

[Aubrey Gordon]

It's just so shitty.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's nine states now are legislating pronoun use and are making it illegal for teachers to use kids preferred pronouns if it doesn't match their birth certificate.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus God almighty.

[Michael Hobbs]

Do you want to hear the. Do you want to hear the of galaxy brain justification for these?

[Aubrey Gordon]

No. God, what is it, Michael?

[Michael Hobbs]

You say no, but I'm just gonna keep going regardless. I was just waiting for. That's a formality to hear.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I understand. I'm asking. The consent on this show is fake.

[Michael Hobbs]

Look, I'm going. All right, let me proceed.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You're like those little wind up chattering teeth. Once he starts, there's no. You just gotta let him fall off the edge of the table or just run out of juice or whatever.

[Michael Hobbs]

So the justification for banning social transition is that most kids who socially transition go on to puberty blockers, and most kids who go on puberty blockers go on to hormones. But that's an argument that most of the people who socially transition are trans, and they're actually pretty firm in their identity. Relatively young, they know young. But somehow transphobes have galaxy brained themselves into this idea that this is like putting them on a medical pathway and that this is like bewitching them and like keeping them trans against their wishes. And this weird inversion, this like Darvo nonsense, where it's like, well, there's stigma against detransitioning.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What?

[Michael Hobbs]

So we have to actually make sure that they feel comfortable de transitioning. As if parents who are like, we affirm your trans identity, but when they say, mommy, I'm cis, they'll be like, fuck you. That's why so many CIS kids are homeless. It's like, what the fuck are we talking about?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Dude, Darvo is such a good analogy for what's happening here. For folks who are unfamiliar, Darvo deny attack, reverse victim and offender. Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

The thing is, I didn't actually know that. I just have a friend named Darvo and she sucks. So I was just saying this Darvo shit. That's what I mean.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Okay, okay, okay. It's a lady named Darvo.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The doctor was a woman.

[Michael Hobbs]

You know, Stop making me giggle during dark shit.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Do you understand my job? But, like, I think Darvo is such a good example, because honestly, like, part of what people are so, like, whipped up about right now is children, their parents, and their healthcare provider making decisions about what kind of healthcare they ought to access and when. Yeah, right. Like, it is such deep Darvo shit that you're like, sorry, like a kid in I don't know where Modesto, California, got some healthcare that they wanted and you're this bent out of shape about it.

[Michael Hobbs]

So we're also, of course, seeing this wave of bans on gender affirming care. And, like, it really is hard to convey, like, how serious these laws are. So. This is from a New York Times article. Last month, Florida joined at least four other states that make providing gender affirming care a a felony. Florida's law penalizes doctors who violate the law with up to five years in prison.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus fucking hell, dude.

[Michael Hobbs]

It also changes child custody rules to treat transition care as equivalent to child abuse.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yikes.

[Michael Hobbs]

This rapid onset gender dysphoria narrative is central to the passage of these laws in Florida. They have, like, a long kind of briefing, like, allegedly studious document that goes along with the law, where they're kind of laying out the evidence base, which refers to Lisa Litman's paper. Numerous times in Georgia, a congressman reads Lisa Lippmann's study into the record.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Michael Hobbs]

I also got obsessed with this, like, evidence brief, frequently asked questions thing that was submitted to the Utah legislature that has numerous explicit references to rapid onset gender dysphoria and also includes a bunch of testimonials from detransitioners. The first one is by somebody named Ashira, and she says, I was about 17 when I heard the word for transgender. All I did was Google gender therapist in Calgary, and that was how that happened. After, like, three sessions, I got my permission slip or whatever for transitioning medically for hormones. And so I started in 2013 on testosterone. And it wasn't until 2015 or 2016 actually, that I had any surgery. And then the link to it is a link to YouTube and if you watched just a little bit longer after this, the person interviewing her is like, oh, so how old were you when you transitioned? And she's like, oh, 23 or 24.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Fully illegal adult.

[Michael Hobbs]

They also have somebody who in the document it says, Billy Burley took cross sex hormones and getting surgeries to change his outward appearance after a difficult childhood and being sexually assaulted by his swim coach. He did his best to live as a woman, but ultimately the truth of his biology won out. So I followed the link which goes to a sort of like a born again ministry website. He's kind of a little bit vague on the details, but he's like, I never felt comfortable in my body. And then in college I fell in love with someone and then I was denying it. And after five or six years in a failed marriage, I finally decided to transition. And I'm like, I don't think all this happened before he was 18.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Guys. We have other policy interventions. If someone before 18 has a 6 year failed marriage, it appears to be.

[Michael Hobbs]

In his 30s or his late 20s that he transitioned.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Boy, oh boy.

[Michael Hobbs]

The thing that I really want to stress here, and I know I do this on this show all the time, is that this is not normal. Right? Both of us have worked in kind of development and NGO charity world. And like, if you're talking about a real social problem, you should be able to point to instances of it that everyone agrees are examples, right? So if I say that like, school shootings are a problem in America, if I talk about Uvald, Texas, the most hardcore far right gun nut will be like, yep, that's a school shooting. If we're going to talk about kids being rushed into transition, it's like, sorry, your examples need to have kids and they need to have rushing. It's really fucking suspicious that you cannot provide straightforward examples of your own claims. That is not what we see from real movements that are seeking to safeguard women or whatever they say they're trying to do. Protect children. That's something we see from anti vaxxers.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I also just want folks to like, flash forward in their brains. Dear CIS listeners, come along with me on a journey.

[Michael Hobbs]

Cisterners, Cisterners.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Do you think that 50 years from now people will be going, hey, remember that chapter when we thought some people were transgender and we were all totally wrong?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, Mass psychosis.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Or do you think we're gonna be going, hey, look at this additional chapter in the horror show of American history where we once again decided to scapegoat a group of people who already had very Little.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Even if you don't give a shit about trans people, give a shit about you saving face in a couple decades.

[Michael Hobbs]

I love that you're like, we're taking names. I just want you to know the LGBT community sees you. And we have an Excel spreadsheet.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Gay reverse Santa, he keeps the naughty and nice lists. Yeah, yeah, good.

[Michael Hobbs]

So these were all of the alleged smoking guns that the anti trans movement has pointed to as, like, irrefutable proof that kids are being rushed into surgeries and hormones. All of which turned out not to be proof of that and evidence of, in fact, the opposite. The final crescendo, the biggest smoking gun and the greatest example of this happening is something that happened last month. This is very recent history. In April of 2024, the United Kingdom published something called the CAS Review. So what do you know about the cast report already, Aubrey?

[Aubrey Gordon]

First I'm gonna say how I feel about the cast report, which is.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, God, I forgot you have your fucking soundboard next to you.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I found my slide whistle. I hate it. So here's the situation. What I know about the cast report is a person who does not treat trans people and does not have expertise in gender affirming healthcare or, like, related fields. Like, did an audit of the NHS's Gender Clinic and found a bunch of wild things. Or, like, made a bunch of claims that have led to a dramatic reduction of the NHS gender affirming care. Yes.

[Michael Hobbs]

Wait, say the thing about her qualifications one more time. But. But sound meaner. Sound like, really, like, put your. Put your throat into it. What do I do?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Are you trying to force me to reply, Guy?

[Michael Hobbs]

No, no, do it, do it, do it. Just. Just. Just make the voice thing look.

[Aubrey Gordon]

All I know is that this lady has no qualifications for treating trans people.

[Michael Hobbs]

Who also has a soundboard on their phone.

[Aubrey Gordon]

You know how I feel about that. Mike.

[Michael Hobbs]

You can't even do it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I started laughing. That's how I feel about that one. That's good.

[Michael Hobbs]

You were so hesitant to do the voice, you're like, I don't know if she's good.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't know what's happening here.

[Michael Hobbs]

I wanted to say say it as if you know a rap air horn is coming, but that would reveal the whole thing.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Is that an app on your phone?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes, it is.

[Aubrey Gordon]

God damn it, Michael.

[Michael Hobbs]

It's in like Siri. When Siri, like, suggests apps, it's like most opened.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Michael, on this show, we value sound effects, which is why I say, oh.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. I knew you'd Escalate. I knew you'd take it there. Again, we are giggling about some of the darkest social forces in the world.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That we giggle about. Dark shit.

[Michael Hobbs]

Basically, the Cat cast review is the entire reason I wanted to do this series of episodes. Because over the course of the last decade, effectively every institution in Britain has been captured by this like anti trans movement. This like allegedly polite anti trans movement, especially led by parents. But the same kinds of messages that we started to see on Those forums in 2016 are showing up on the BBC. They're showing up in politics. Both the Tories and the Labor Party are echoing this stuff. We see it in the courts, right, that blocked puberty blockers after the case. That was not somebody getting rushed into care. Right?

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

And so this report is yet another, I think, very obvious example of somebody looking around for any excuse to invalidate this kind of care and to completely ignore the underlying facts as they do it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

The number one thing to know is that the cast report does not provide any new information. With one exception. The vast majority of the report is basically like it's a review. They're putting together all of the existing data. They've commissioned these reviews from the University of York. And it's kind of supposed to be like a factual overview of like, what does the data say, what do the records say, et cetera. The only piece of new information contained in this report is an audit of England and Wales only gender clinic. So again we're looking at the question of whether or not kids are being rushed into care. Right. And so we have the medical records of every single person who was seen by this gender clinic between 2018 and 2023. I just want to go, this is going to be boring. But I just want to go through it because it's really important to like stay grounded in reality, which like everyone else seems to refuse to do.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I love this as a statement from a podcast host. This is going to be boring.

[Michael Hobbs]

But I know, I know. I'll do the rap air horn at like 10 second intervals to keep you awake. Yeah, fuck off. So they did this audit. So as a starting point, between 2018 and 2023, this clinic only saw 3,306 patients. So that's 661 patients per year. Over the course of five years, only 892 kids were referred to endocrinology. So 178 kids per year were even eligible to get puberty blockers or hormones. 73% of the people who were seen by this clinic got nothing. So just As a starting point. Right. Only 178 kids were referred to endocrinology. Of the kids who were referred to endocrinology, only 145 kids per year got puberty blockers. 97 kids per year got puberty blockers and hormones. So these are minuscule numbers.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Which isn't like good news that not a lot of people are getting cancer.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, exactly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

But it is evidence that that sort of inundation just isn't really happening.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And even if it was, that the sort of filter function that is built in is doing a pretty rigorous job.

[Michael Hobbs]

I mean, speaking of filtering function, the audit also includes numbers on how many appointments the kids had before they were referred to puberty blockers and hormones. The average kid had 6.7 appointments before a referral. And then the report also knows that the average total appointments is 10 before this court decision and then after the court decision made it harder, 14 appointments. So even after they refer to endocrinology, they then have another couple of appointments of gatekeeping.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I mean, I think this is again where like anti trans rhetoric really reveals itself. Right. Which is like there is not an amount of gatekeeping that makes people feel comfortable.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes. The last thing that this audit found is that fewer than 10 kids detransitioned during these five years. So the anti trans brain trust loves pointing out they're like, well, they might have aged into the adult clinics and then they later detransitioned, which fair enough, like we don't have perfect data on this, but a lot of these kids were getting puberty blockers and hormones at 15. And so what this means is that over the course of the following three years, fewer than 10 of them detransitioned out of 3,300 kids. If we were seeing a mass wave of detransitioners, we would see some sign of that from kids who were getting hormones at 15. But then to me, the best sign that this is a moral panic document that is the output of a years long moral panic that has taken over all these institutions in the UK is that these are the central findings of this CAST report. To me, this should be like the beginning of the report, there were concerns that kids were being rushed into care. Like, hey, we looked into it. There's really no cause for concern. This audit, all of the data that I have just given you, this is appendix eight.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh no, come on.

[Michael Hobbs]

Of the CAST report, all of the rest of it is just filibustering.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Is there any point in this report where they talk about like the issues that trans kids face that could be remedied by healthcare.

[Michael Hobbs]

Dude, no, there's a whole thing about like, context, but at no point does it mention like the rise of transphobia in the United Kingdom. The word transphobia only appears three times in the entire document.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Jesus hell.

[Michael Hobbs]

We will find out more about the process by which this came about and I'm very confident that it will look extremely bad. But also, just the text, the straightforward text of the document is just a series of anti trans talking points.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Boy, oh boy, oh boy.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is from the introduction to the report written by Dr. Hilary Castle herself.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We have to start from the understanding that this group of children and young people are just that, children and young people, first and foremost, not individuals solely defined by their gender incongruence or gender related distress.

[Michael Hobbs]

Right. They're not defined by it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

We have to cut through the noise and polarization to recognize that they need the same standards of high quality care to meet their needs as any other child or young person. When you talk to these young people and their parents, they want the same things as everyone else. The chance to be heard, respected and believed. To have their questions answered and to access help and advice. It is only when they have been on very long waiting lists and sidelined from usual care and local services that they are forced to do their own research and may come to a single medical answer to their problems.

[Michael Hobbs]

They are forced to do their own research and may come to a single medical answer to their problem problems.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is like a slightly more grounded sounding version.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Of the ROGD stuff in general.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Hey guys, let's really empathize with these kids. And then from there we can understand how wrong they are.

[Michael Hobbs]

Essentially the only evidence for rapid onset gender dysphoria at this point is the fact that there were more referrals to gender clinics, like starting in 2014. Referrals went up very rapidly.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

Personally, I think this is just very easily explained by the fact that trans people are more visible in society and are less stigmatized than they used to be. I don't see that as like a particularly big mystery. But just over and over again, this is another anti trans talking point. Over and over again people just say like, well, that can't explain it.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

So in the report it says, although it is certainly the case that there's much greater acceptance of trans identities, particularly among generation Z, and this may account for some of the increase in numbers, this is not an adequate explanation for the overall phenomenon.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Why?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, there's no citation given for that and Then it says the exponential increase in numbers within a five year time frame is very much faster than would be expected for the normal evolution of acceptance of a minority group. So our friend, the health nerd, Gideon, he did a whole post about, like, whether or not this is really exponential. But it's, to me, the fact that referrals went from roughly 700 to roughly 2,500. Like, if you look at it on a relative scale, it kind of looks like, ooh, they tripled in a couple years. But it's also just a very small number of kids. The fact that we have 1800 extra kids getting referrals over the course of five years is not that weird. And then the other thing that it doesn't mention is that the numbers have leveled off. So since 2018, even before the pandemic, the numbers basically flatlined around 2500. There's some data that sort of makes it look like it's spiking, but then the footnotes of the report say that this is likely a duplicate. So it kind of looks like it's doubling yet again, but it appears that that's like, that's falsely counted, so it's plateaued. So again, if we're talking about social contagion. Right. The way that a virus spreads, it would continue going up.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

So the other component that we saw in these parental accounts was this idea that, like, they're being influenced by their peers and online.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Sure. The Internet did it.

[Michael Hobbs]

The Internet. The computer again, you're gonna love this language. I'm sending you an excerpt.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Gender questioning young. Young people and their parents have spoken to the review about online information that describes normal adolescent discomfort as a possible sign of being trans, and that particular influencers have had a substantial impact on their child's beliefs and understanding of their gender.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is the precise sewage that we saw in the Lippman study. Right. Kids are having normal teenage issues, and because of the Internet, they think that that means they're trans.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I've never wanted an air horn app on my phone more.

[Michael Hobbs]

I will send it to.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Peer influence during this stage of life is very powerful. As well as the influence of social media, the review has heard accounts of female students forming intense friendships with other gender questioning or transgender students at school and then identifying as trans themselves. This is someone who doesn't understand what the coming out process is.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yep, they're turning the frogs gay. But the frogs are teenagers. Teenagers age, social groups.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is like totally fucking anecdotal. Everything but, like, that could just as easily be trans students seeking out other trans students because they sort of like, have a sense that they're kind of on the same page in some important way.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yes.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This is like all the fucking gay kids at your school who came out after high school and you're like, yeah, no shit.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's also. I'm. Man, we can't go into every single one of these. But I was putting these paragraphs in categories and, and one of my biggest categories was just like general jankiness. So in this, in this section it says clinicians and parents reported that gay students are still being stigmatized and bullied in school. And there's sometimes a perception that there is less validation for them than for trans pupils.

[Aubrey Gordon]

What are we doing this shit again?

[Michael Hobbs]

This is another bizarre fucking conspiracy theory that trans folks always trot out that gay kids are saying that they're trans because, like, it's easier to be a trans person than a gay person.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Which is also wild because in our continuing, like, Journey to the Wayback Machine, a very standard response to queer people coming out in the 90s was like, so you think you're a woman or so you think you're a man? Yeah, you're just finding reasons not to listen to us. And I wish that you could just get right with that. That is what's happening within you, right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Because it's like real clear from the outside that like most transphobes and homophobes don't really deeply know the difference between those two identities.

[Michael Hobbs]

There's also, this is also the part where the misogyny at the heart of this also comes out. There's something very weird how this whole movement says that it's like we're out to protect girls. Right? And like, fairness in women's sports and all this kind of stuff. But then the only other piece of evidence for rabid onset gender dysphoria is there's more kids coming to the clinics. And most of those people are assigned female at birth. That's like the only other piece of evidence that they can point to. And this, this report has so much stuff about how, like, girls are mentally unstable. It says puberty is an intense period of rapid change and can be a difficult process where young people are vulnerable to mental health problems, particularly girls. Girls reported more hours of social media use than boys. 43% of girls used social media for three or more hours per day, compared to 22% of boys. Girls were more likely to have low self esteem, to have body weight dissatisfaction, but to be unhappy with their appearance. Girls were more likely to report fewer hours of sleep than boys and to report experiencing disrupted sleep more often or most of the time. Again, it's not really saying what it means, but it's like, yeah, girls are like. So I guess like sleep deprived and mentally ill that they all think they're trans.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Girls were more likely to be diagnosed with neurasthenia and hysteria. Girls were more likely to report a menacing figure hidden in the yellow wallpaper of the room where they're confined. What are we doing? I'm hitting my desk.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is another thing that I just don't find all that mysterious. I think the super basic fact is that young girls are kind of allowed to experiment with gender presentation in a way that young boys typically aren't. Right. And so I think what's happening is that if you're trans and you're assigned female at birth, your parents are going to kind of let you experiment and maybe let you wear boys clothes. Whereas if you're assigned male at birth and you're like, oh, I want to wear mom's dress or something, or I want to grow my hair long, parents are going to be like, fuck, no, you don't.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Most like school dress codes or school uniform codes, allow for girls to wear pants, but do not allow for boys to wear skirts.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

And in terms of like, the repercussions. Right. If you are a person who has attended a trans day of remembrance event, you have heard the reading of the names. You have maybe seen photos of people who passed. Those are overwhelmingly trans women. And they are overwhelmingly trans women of color. Yeah, there's just a lot of garbage. Like I. Yeah.

[Michael Hobbs]

I think it's also important, though, to mention that it's not just trans kids that have it really tough. It's also really tough for their transphobic parents.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, good.

[Michael Hobbs]

So this is our next excerpt.

[Aubrey Gordon]

The review heard concerns from many parents about their child being socially transitioned and affirmed in their expressed gender without parental involvement.

[Michael Hobbs]

I love being socially transitioned. They've been. They've been transitioned.

[Aubrey Gordon]

This was predominantly where an adolescent had, quote, unquote, come out at school, quote, unquote, but expressed concern about how their parents might react. This set up an adversarial position between parent and child where some parents felt, quote, unquote, forced to affirm their child's assumed identity or risk being painted as transphobic and or unsupportive.

[Michael Hobbs]

Again, we have this thing where it's like they're going to be called unsupportive just because they don't support their kids. Yep.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Wow. I didn't think we were resorting to name calling, but I guess we are.

[Michael Hobbs]

They're going to call me short just because I'm 5 foot 6.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Some parents who spoke to the review felt that social transition was of more benefit to their child in terms of its social impact than in helping to manage their gender incongruence. They describe how their children were previously isolated and bullied, but their status amongst peers has improved as a result of quote unquote coming out.

[Michael Hobbs]

This is like straight from transphobic websites.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Oh, when pro gay parents get together, they get to be pflag. And when anti gay parents get together, we're suddenly bigots.

[Michael Hobbs]

Oh, so it's okay to be nice to kids, but as soon as you're meant. Really interesting. Hypocrisy much?

[Aubrey Gordon]

I don't know, I just find this whole thing, like, so sad.

[Michael Hobbs]

And also, I mean, the saddest thing, of course, is this document is an extremely obvious and relatively explicit call to put more barriers in front of kids who identify as trans. It has this kind of like this proposed restructuring of the NHS to basically put more roadblocks in place so that when kids identify as trans, instead of getting referred directly to the Gender Identity Service, they have to go through, like psychologists and people who aren't trained in gender dysphoria to make sure to rule out all of these other things and to basically make transition a last resort. So kids are already again, 10 to 14 appointments before they get onto puberty blockers.

[Aubrey Gordon]

That's so long. That's so long.

[Michael Hobbs]

You know, they've already just banned puberty blockers in the uk and because puberty blockers are considered to be a necessary precursor to getting other forms of gender affirming care, this basically results in a ban on gender affirming care.

[Aubrey Gordon]

As such a ban on care for youth. Right?

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah. Although there's also plenty of kind of coded stuff in this report about the need for, like, more responsive services for people 17 to 20.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah, great, good.

[Michael Hobbs]

I mean, people are going to yell at me for saying this, but this is the very explicit project of this entire review. Like, if you actually read it and you engage with what it's saying at every turn, it's saying we need to consider all the options before transition. We need to maybe consider slowing down. Right. Recommendation number two in the report is that hormones should be used with extreme caution. Well, all fucking evidence is that they are. It's 97 kids a year in the entire fucking England, Wales are getting hormones. I would call that extreme caution.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Yeah. What Would extreme caution look like if not that?

[Michael Hobbs]

But again, they're winning. And it appears the NHS is going to be restructured around this, like, quote, unquote, new model that is just going to make it even harder to get a form of care that is already extremely hard. That's the output of all of this. Right. That's the legacy of the rapid onset gender dysphoria narrative is no evidence and a huge, what appears to be global at this point crackdown on kids getting a kind of care for which there's very good evidence that it helps and no evidence that it harms anybody. You need a different soundboard. Where's your soundboard? You need a groaning soundboard.

[Aubrey Gordon]

I need a custom. I need a bespoke soundboard.

[Michael Hobbs]

An Aubrey Grunt machine.

[Aubrey Gordon]

If we were gonna make, like, a taxonomy of maintenance phase episodes, one of them would be the, like, there's a kernel of truth here, but it's gotten blown out of proportion and people think it's un universal. Or there'd be another one that's like. The studies were much more nuanced, but the PR really blew it out of proportion. Yeah, the. It's fully made up and originated on the Internet category of our shows is one of the smallest categories. It's like Bragg's. And this.

[Michael Hobbs]

Yeah, yeah.

[Aubrey Gordon]

Like, that is really telling and makes me, again, profoundly upset. Set.

[Michael Hobbs]

I was waiting for you to use the voice. I mean, I had my thumb on that for, like, six minutes. Give me the voice, woman.