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Today’s children face many new adversities that past generations could never have imagined. Filmmaker, Don Johnson sits down to discuss his new film Dysconnected, and the truth behind this radical movement thats being pushed on our children.
Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion
Cy Kellett :
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Ct Kellett, your host, and very happy to welcome my friend Don Johnson this time to talk about a new film that Don has. This is actually a very busy time for Don. He’s got a brand new book out for Catholic Answers Press called Twisted Unto Destruction, and he’s got a brand new movie out called Dysconnected, which we are here to discuss. Don, welcome.
Don Johnson:
Hey, Cy.
Cy Kellett :
Congratulations on all the things-
Don Johnson:
Thanks.
Cy Kellett :
-that you got.
Don Johnson:
Yeah, didn’t exactly plan for them all to be released within 10 days of each other.
Cy Kellett :
But sometimes that’s how it goes.
Don Johnson:
-sometimes that’s how it goes.
Cy Kellett :
Yeah. Do your children remember what you look like? Or are they-
Don Johnson:
It’s getting a little hazy for them, but I pop in once in a while.
Cy Kellett :
I watched your movie, Dysconnected, and I actually am still not sure what my emotional response to it is. It churned me up. And it’s a movie about people involved in the transgender movement, people who have transitioned, one of whom in the movie … maybe more than one I, but certainly one that de-transitioned, I guess is the way you say it. And what a mix of emotions from the joy of seeing …
Each person is a lovely instance of God’s creation. And it’s beautiful that you as a filmmaker are able to show that. There’s no sense of this is the enemy over here. But also, a sense of horrible loss and tragedy, fear for what is happening and will continue to happen, especially to young women and girls. And also, these stories come full circle in some cases and have beautiful redemptive endings. So I’m just starting there. I don’t know how to respond to your movie emotionally.
Don Johnson:
Well, as a filmmaker I’ll take that.
Cy Kellett :
Okay.
Don Johnson:
Honestly, I mean, movie making is … They’re emotion machines supposedly. That’s what they’re supposed to be. Right?
Cy Kellett :
Okay.
Don Johnson:
That’s what they are. And so as a filmmaker, you’re trying to get people to feel something, the visual medium. So the worst thing you can hear is, “It made me think.” I mean, yes, we want people to think, but if you’re thinking too much, you’re probably bored by it and you didn’t get to the end of the movie. So I’m glad, because you’re one of the few that have seen it so far. So I appreciate that. It’s not even out to the general public yet. But it is an emotional issue that has many layers to it. There’s a lot of pain and suffering, which of course, as a dad, that’s why I’m making the movie. I’ve got four kids, they range throughout those teenage years and, what a horrible time to be a teenager.
So trying to address that issue. But I also know that as a parent, a lot of us parents are just feeling overwhelmed. I call it a tsunami in the notes for the movie. This thing seems to be overtaking all of our institutions. It’s affecting all of our families. I suspect everyone listening, unless you’re in a cave somewhere, that you know people who, “Oh, her daughter just changed her pronouns,” or whatever.
Cy Kellett :
Yeah. It’s everywhere.
Don Johnson:
It’s everywhere.
Cy Kellett :
And certainly in many of our own homes and somewhat horrifying to parents, and we’ll get to the part about it being an issue that is separating parents and children and the mechanism of that. But first of all, the first insight in the movie that you share that I found quite striking is that if you attend to the cover of Vanity Fair Magazine or the mass medium anyways, you’ll have a sense that the transgender movement is about middle-aged men who want to present as women. But that is demographically a complete deception. That is not what this movement is about.
Don Johnson:
That’s right. That’s a very small percentage of people. Yes, they make a good magazine cover. Yes, we see them in the high reaches of government. And yes, they are having an effect on the culture, but that effect is being felt primarily among young girls, some boys, but primarily among young girls. And it’s just getting younger and younger.
What these men have is usually some sort of autogynephilia, where it’s a sexual dysfunction, where they get aroused by dressing in women’s clothes. That is not gender dysphoria that we have typically assigned to young kids. With the young kids, it’s actually mostly been very young boys. About 0.02% of young boys would’ve had a question, “I don’t feel quite comfortable in my body.” And they all grow out of it. 99% grow out of it by the time they get out of puberty. This is historically what has happened. But starting in 2015 with Bruce Jenner switching over to Caitlin and a huge movement online. So Discord and all of the social media were just full of pro-trans movement propaganda towards young girls. Starting then, it has overtaken. It’s this huge fad that has overtaken the teenage girls, and they’re the ones that are just being decimated by this.
Cy Kellett :
Okay. Well, what about the person who says, “No, Don, that is not correct for you to use the word “fad” because what’s really going on is society is becoming more tolerant, and people who were hidden before can now come out of the shadows.”?
Don Johnson:
Yeah. So the argument is that this is actually a biological condition, that certain people are just born this way, and that historically they would’ve had to keep that under wraps. Now that society is accepting it, now they can all come out. And of course, you look at that, and you say, “Okay, if it is a biological condition, first of all, let’s examine how we’re treating that.” Secondly, if it is a biological condition, you’d see a wide spectrum of society across all ages that-
Cy Kellett :
Why aren’t 40-year-old women coming out? Yeah.
Don Johnson:
You wouldn’t see, which is what we are seeing, you wouldn’t see a group of 12 girls who in sixth grade all decided that they were gay. And then that same 12 girls the next year all decided that, “No, we’re actually trans fluid or gender fluid or something.” And you wouldn’t see then 15 of them go down to Planned Parenthood en masse and get their testosterone from them. If you look at how the movement works-
Cy Kellett :
But we are seeing things like that in many places.
Don Johnson:
We’re absolutely seeing it.
Cy Kellett :
Clusters of girls-
Don Johnson:
Huge clusters of girls will literally show up at Planned Parenthood, the whole friend group. In fact, one of the young girls, we hid her identity in the film just because she’s so young, and we don’t need the harassment. But she’s 15. She got into it when she was 12, 13 in the GSA club in school, which is the Gay Straight Alliance, which oftentimes is essentially now a recruitment tool for the trans movement. And she’s like, “Yeah, our whole friend group, we just kept moving through this.” And actually, the way she got out of it is she started thinking about, “This doesn’t seem like it’s biological.”
She literally started thinking along those lines and started asking questions and then was basically shut down. Well, we can’t ask questions about this. So it’s absolutely not biological. It is a social movement now. And again, I don’t want to be too quick with the fad. I should qualify when I say fad.
Cy Kellett :
Okay.
Don Johnson:
Because you think fad, you think when we … Well no, you and I are both even too old for goth, but I’m thinking in the nineties, the goth movement in the eighties. Yeah. There’s fads that people-
Cy Kellett :
I want to go back to the hula hoop. Sorry.
Don Johnson:
You’re really-
Cy Kellett :
You’re really old.
Don Johnson:
But these kind of trends like a social trend where you want to be cool. There is some of that, right? You can be an outcast in society, feel very unpopular, especially in today’s social media age. But you’ve got an Instagram account and you flip your pronouns on your Instagram account, suddenly I’ve got 50,000 followers. I’m a superstar. So there is some of that. But I also try to take a fairly good section of the film to look at some of the other emotional, psychological issues that are at play here. And there are a lot of them.
So it’s not a biological issue, but it certainly is an issue that we traditionally would have tried to address with therapy. So things like autism, upwards of 30%, at minimum 30% of these kids are on the autism spectrum. It’s probably more like 50 or higher. There’s that aspect. A lot of them have been abused. So the sexual abuse factor plays a major role. Many of them come from broken homes and their identity is crushed that way. Pornography is a huge player in this where you have young girls that are just sick and tired of being objectified, being-
Cy Kellett :
They’re probably afraid of being objectified.
Don Johnson:
Absolutely, absolutely afraid of… And you think about, the porn that was available when we were kids, you’d have to sneak around and find a magazine somewhere and then you’d find a picture of a naked lady. It was bad enough. I mean it wasn’t good. But today, it’s violent rape and degradation on your phone to everyone.
Cy Kellett :
With full sound and color, it’s action. It’s a totally different animal. And also you don’t have to… your friend’s brother got the dad’s magazine and now we can all thumb through it. This is children at 8, 9, 10 years old, seeing sex for the first time as a profoundly violent and violating act.
Don Johnson:
And then they are being asked, sometimes they feel forced almost. The social pressure is so strong to be a part of that. And they’re like, Well, I don’t want to be the girl in this situation, maybe I will be the boy. I will pull myself out of that. So there’s all of these different factors at play pushing that population towards grabbing a transgender identity.
Unfortunately, it’s not going goth where you’re like, Okay, I can look at those pictures and laugh now. Or my pictures from the eighties with my mullets and the crazy clothes. You think, Okay, that was silly. Now I move on. This is permanent damage we are doing to these kids. Because it’s not, If you go take a trans identity now, there’s a very clear vortex that you’re going to get sucked into some steps that you’re going to follow. And there’s no way out of those really, once you’re in, you’re on this path. And it starts with social transition where you were going to change your names, maybe behind your parents back if you’re at school. We’re going to change your pronoun. We’re going to change your name. We’re going to have different clothes for you at school to wear when you get here so that you can dress like your new gender.
So we’ll, social transition and then at the earliest convenience, if you are pre-pubescent, we will put you on puberty blockers, which stop puberty. And by the way, stop a lot of other things with your body. It’s a horrendous, horrendous thing to do to your body. After you’ve been on puberty blockers for a while, inevitably high nineties in the percentage, you then go on cross-sex hormones. So if you’re a girl we’ll start to feed you testosterone, weekly shots, monthly shots every two weeks., After testosterone for as little as a few months to a year, we will schedule you for surgery starting with what’s euphemistically called top surgery, double mastectomy, removing your breasts.
Cy Kellett :
And these are minors or near minors having their breasts removed.
Don Johnson:
Minors, and this is a very important point because this is disputed among the culture. No, we wouldn’t do this to anybody below 18. No, we’re absolutely doing this. And in fact, just in the week that we’re talking, several hospitals around the country have pulled down their entire websites because it has been alerted that, oh, here’s the videos we are showing you about how in fact we are doing these surgeries on 15 year olds, on 13 year olds. The organization that provides the quote guidance to doctors wpath, they recommend as young as 13. 13 years old for a double mastectomy.
Cy Kellett :
And where does their expertise come from?
Don Johnson:
I would say nowhere. Their ideologues. I mean they’re just, Yeah, no, where’s
Cy Kellett :
Where does that money come from?
Don Johnson:
So the money of course is huge in this. So the money comes from pharmaceutical. So the pharmaceutical companies obviously are making a ton of money in the same way that pharmaceutical companies make any money. If they can sell you drugs, which is what the synthetic hormones are, they’re produced in a lab and then sold to you. And you think about Ct, what a great game that is. In the past, if you are a pharmaceutical company, you’d have to wait for somebody to get sick.
Cy Kellett :
But now-
Don Johnson:
Now everybody’s available. Well, not only are we going to take healthy people and give them drugs, the drugs that we give them actually make them sick. So you go on puberty blockers, you go on cross-ex hormones, you are now a medical patient for life because your body does not produce the proper hormones to keep it alive. You’re just not doing what your body is supposed to do.
Cy Kellett :
So we’ve got you as a customer for life.
Don Johnson:
Customer for life. And then the side effects, then you have to get more drugs than the surgeries, which are horrendous. As emotionally painful as it was to watch parts of the film, the stuff that I kept out of it, just for the sake of keeping it PG 13, you can’t believe what we’re doing to kids’ bodies, horrendous stories you hear. Yeah. It’s a billion dollar in your industry already, the surgeries. And that is a growth industry.
So we are marketing this. And again, if this was biological, there’d be a set number of people that this applies to and we wait for them to come and we give them the drugs. No, we are marketing. In fact, I saw an article just this week about Planned Parenthood’s new finance model, and this is a huge moneymaker for Planned Parenthood. They don’t have to just rely on abortions now. Selling testosterone is a huge moneymaker for them. So you can walk in as a 14 year old and in an hour walk out with testosterone, essentially no questions asked. Now they’re not going to admit that. But anecdotally, that’s what happens. You can walk in as a whole group of junior high girls and all of you walk out with testosterone.
Cy Kellett :
One of the emotions, although I’m still sifting through my emotions, is one of shame at not fighting this. How are we as fathers and mothers as adults not saying, no, not just you can’t touch my children, you can’t do this to children. You are wrong to do this. That a girl who comes to you and says I’m a boy does and has nothing wrong physically with her. You’re not diagnosing she has breast cancer or she has ovarian cancer. She’s presenting with no physical symptoms. And you are medicalizing her, putting her on all kinds of medicines. You’re doing surgeries on her and her personality, her judgment is she can’t vote yet. She can’t even be tried in adult court if she commits a murder because we know that their brains are not formed. Their mind is different. So it’s clearly exploitive child abuse. And I have to say, I feel shame watching it, what else can I do? I have to say no to somebody like it. We have to say no.
Don Johnson:
Yeah. Well, and one of the reasons we made the movie is that people, some people are unaware. Knowledge is growing, but a lot of us say two years ago we didn’t know this stuff was going on. So I mean, fair enough. We’re trying to make people aware. But I agree with you Ct once you’re aware, this is not one of those issues that we can like, Yeah, it’s a cultural issue. And it’s sad. Now this is the medical malpractice scandal possibly in the history of the world, right? It’s that big and that evil, these, well,
Cy Kellett :
You would put it up there with things like the Tuskegee Airmen experiments or the sterilizing of women who had mental health problems.
Don Johnson:
Or lobotomies. Think of the scale.
Cy Kellett :
The scale is enormous.
Don Johnson:
That’s what-
Cy Kellett :
And the damage is permanent. You cannot reverse. You’re not just flipping on a switch and flipping it off like, Oh well we went this way for, We’ll go back the other way. And this is what you see in the movie. The consequences in the body of women.
Don Johnson:
And this is a flat out lie that they’re telling kids by the way, that we need to be aware of as parents, as teachers, as pastors, whatever. The ideologues will tell kids, We’re just putting you on pause when we give you puberty blockers. And then you start up again or you switch for a little while and you switch back. That’s absolutely false it’s absolutely not true. Your body is permanently changed from everything from your voice, which is a major deal. You now as a girl will have a male voice for the rest of your life there’s no going back from that, and this is, it’s devastating to, because the detransitioners, I mean there’s a Reddit group, it’s over 40,000 detransitioners strong right now. The numbers behind this are way bigger than people think they are. Hundreds of thousands of girls get sucked into it.
Cy Kellett :
Well, I think one of the things that we’ll stop at Don is if we just have laws that say if someone’s done this to you, there’s no statute of limitations. You can sue them until you’re a hundred. Then doctors will stop doing it because the risk won’t be on the child. The risk will be on the doctor and then they’ll be a lot more careful.
Don Johnson:
That is the hope, right? That is the hope that we can sue them into submission. No that’s right. That’s where it’s going to. In fact, the plastic surgeon that we interview in the film, that’s exactly what he said, is the law has to come down on the side of the kids. The doctors have to be afraid of mutilating these kids. I know that we are going to be rallying in front of the American Academy of Pediatricians National Conference up in Anaheim here in a couple weeks. So a group of us are going to-
Cy Kellett :
What day will that be?
Don Johnson:
It’s actually on the same day as the premiere of the film. So it worked out. So we’re going to start and we’re not telling you exactly where because it’s going to be some counter protests it sounds like. But let me know and we’ll get you in. It’s across all wide spectrum of religious beliefs and political beliefs. And they’re like, No, we just need to stop mutilating kids. And so we’re going to be out there trying to educate people. I think the doctors should, I don’t know, on the front of our shirts, we have do no harm. That’s the message. What are you doing? I don’t know.
Cy Kellett :
But you don’t just stop with… it’s not just a movie full of outrage certainly. As a matter of fact, part of why you’ve end up at the end feeling so much a desire to make this stop to contribute to stopping it is that it’s nothing like what’s sold when people use just euphemisms of affirming or what was it, gender affirming and all surgery and all that. Because what you see is violence being done to children who were saying because they gave consent, we can do this violence to them, but they’re not of an age to give consent to what you’re doing.
Putting us in touch with those young people allows us to say no, the stakes are too high for me to ignore this. And for me to kind of, Oh, I don’t want to upset anybody on Facebook. No. It’s time to upset some people and say, No, this is child mutilation. Stop it. But you do something else in the movie, which is a kind of intellectual turn where you connect this with a kind of theology, a kind of post humanist, it’s almost gnostic hatred of the body that the real me is my spirit that my body is just an accoutrement that comes along that I could just change. Give us a little bit of that.
Don Johnson:
Yeah. I think this is an important part of the story and that we need to understand what’s the thinking behind this. And part of that was practical. I was trying to follow the money and follow the… Who is pushing this? Because it does seem to be a movement where you can’t necessarily find a bogeyman here or here, although there are a few. But it’s intense, irrational hatred of people. And that got me looking at more the philosophy and the spiritual reality behind that. And you mentioned gnosticism, of course that is this dualistic view of reality where matter is we hate matter. The spirit-
Cy Kellett :
The spirit is all that’s good
Don Johnson:
Is all that’s good. And you think, what does it take for… Carl Truman has done his a great book on this, couple of good books on this. And he asked the question, What do you have to assume to accept the idea that a person can come to you and say, I am a man trapped in a girl’s body. How do you even accept that? What’s the assumptions there? And so we dig into that and it is a gnosticism. There is a hatred of the body, or at least a separation, a disconnection, which is where we get the title of the film. It’s a lot of disconnecting what God joined together, we’re disconnecting, but a disconnecting of self from body. And you look at that, I’m like, well what kind of philosophy separates self from body And I think who was actually the proper, Who is behind that? Who hates the body, who hates the family? And I connect, why is it we hate the body? Well ultimately I think it has to do with the family that the body ties us to
Cy Kellett :
Yeah. I can’t be an utterly free autonomous creature with no obligations or attachments if I have a family, And so we got to move these young people away from their family,
Don Johnson:
Away from their body, away from their family. And this again is… this made me question why the teachers in the past, the teachers unions at schools would’ve been like, Hey, let’s get the family more involved. Let’s get the parents more involved. And now we’ve flipped, counseling too. We got to get the parents involved here. Now it’s flipped. Now we got to hide this. And they’re like so anti-family antibody. And I think at route it’s a hatred of well reality, but the reality that God created is a hatred of the human person made in the image of God, this hylamorphic being of body and soul and spirit. And it is that desire to rage against that rage against, No, I don’t want to be a creature. I don’t want to be told that I was born into this thing. No, I want to be completely free.
Of course, you don’t get free, you become a slave. But that’s the lie. And ultimately I think then it shows itself to be a very satanic sort of dark movement at its root that is just a hatred of God than hatred of the image of God in us. And I don’t see how it can be explained really any other way. Money making, I see the money making you see that. But why make money this way? It’s just so weird. No it’s that dark underneath that it’s a rage against God.
Cy Kellett :
Where I’d like to end with you is on this idea that I said I would get back to earlier in this conversation. And that is the way in which this issue separates parents from children. Certainly it separates all moral issues where there’s some kind of moral innovation. The young are more interested in being on board with it. Where the older… So even in a family that doesn’t have it, the child is not presenting this as an issue. Still, this will divide them from their parents in the sense that, oh my parents, they’re transphobic or whatnot. But there’s a quite conscious effort in the, what might be called the trans community, which I think is actually anti community, of separating children from their parents, they’re not hiding that. The part of the problem is children’s attachment to their parents.
Don Johnson:
Again, the anti-family anti parent aspect of it, the cultish like sociologically, that’s a cult maneuver to separate you from other authorities. I feel like it goes even deeper to connect you from that image of God the father and our blessed mother that you see every day that your parents are parents. I would say for one, parents need to be aware of this, that they are trying to separate your kids from you. And the answer is not for you to go along with this. The answer is not for you to affirm, suicide threats or not. Those suicide threats are,
Cy Kellett :
Oh, that struck me-
Don Johnson:
-scam.
Cy Kellett :
The nasty manipulativeness of this, either your child transitions or they’re going to die of suicide.
Don Johnson:
This is emotional blackmail. It’s a lie. Suicide rates go up after transition. You got to understand this whole thing is a lie. Right? Do not buy into that your kids, I guarantee the wave is just starting now and another few years, there’s going to be so many girls, already we’re starting to see it. So many girls who have such a hatred of the adults in their life that did this to them, but also refuse to help them. Let’s let them go, push them along. The blow back is going to be immense. And I’m telling you, please, parents, pastors, the answer is not to walk alongside them in that way. No. They’re going to regret this and you need to protect them. It is a devastating thing that they will grow out of that We need to-
Cy Kellett :
Got to find some
Don Johnson:
Yeah, I mean how you said it’s one of those movements where you can’t sit on the sidelines and the Facebook thing is actually huge. I know tons of people are like, Hey, they’ll say to me privately, Hey, appreciate what you’re doing. I can’t really share it because I have trans friends online. A lot of people-
Cy Kellett :
Stop it.
Don Johnson:
Well, but I get it. Yeah. But I’ve had several people, it was interesting even trying to get interviews for this film. Several people that I thought would be like, Hey, he’d be great. Why don’t, can you? Absolutely not. They would not because they didn’t agree with it. Because they didn’t want the blow back. Whereas some people, God bless him, the people who show up in this movie are brave. Because there is blow back, there’s professional, personal blow back.
But my answer to them at the time, and it still is like if not you who, because you don’t want to be… I even convinced people to work on the film by saying, Listen, in 20 years we’re going to look back on this the way we look back on lobotomies and all the rest of these crazy insane things. You do not want to be on the wrong side of this thing. Looking back and saying, Yeah, I was too shy. I should have stood up. Now this person is still to this day mutilated and talk slow. And they shouldn’t have been. I should have said, No we have to stand up right now. No. Right. And say, Enough is enough. Even if it’s just a Facebook post. I mean do whatever you can, but that we have to do that because listen, the truth is your trans friends are not happy in that.
I’m just being blunt. They’re not, I’m sorry. This is not a way of life that is going to lead them to fulfillment and the loving thing to do. Especially because it’s so focused on minors now. I mean you think about, I don’t even remember if this part is in the film, but it struck me when I talked to one of the professors at John Paul two institute, he’s like, it’s not just the kids that change their pronouns, but when little Johnny’s in a class and the girl that he has known as Mary now comes and he has to call her Fred or whatever, that’s no small thing. You’re now undermining that fourth grader’s entire view of reality of his parents, of his teachers, of the world around them, of himself. You’re completely undermining his understanding of what the world is like, what the meaning of life is. That’s no small thing. This is a serious, serious issue that affects everyone. If you have to sign up for a job and put your pronouns, even that is not-
Cy Kellett :
It’s such coercive-
Don Johnson:
Well it’s coercive and it’s coercive in such in undermining, insidious way.
Cy Kellett :
And we don’t want to be the person who has a bumper sticker that doesn’t say, Love is love. Everybody wants to be on the side. I feel like, yeah, you’ve gone along with the sexual revolution for this and for this and for this. That doesn’t mean you have to go along with the mutilation of children. And there’s someplace where you got to say no. And even if we disagree completely on gay marriage, we disagree maybe on divorce culture, whatever, fine. But you’re not a monster for disagreeing with me about those. I’m going to be honest with you. If you know that children are being mutilated and you’re scared of… there’s a certain moral monstrousness about that you’re scared to say, No, that’s wrong. Then I’m sorry. This is not a sexual revolution issue. It’s child abuse issue and get it right.
Don Johnson:
I agree with you on this. And in fact that that is what we’re seeing in certain corners. So the rally in front of the pediatrician’s convention has groups, Gays Against Groomers is there-
Cy Kellett :
I’ve listened to the spokeswoman for them and she’s just great on this topic.
Don Johnson:
-these kind of groups. Now that’s not to say that we shouldn’t understand the philosophy underlying. I’ve also told this, at some point the Catholic church is the only one left standing. And that’s the one that’s going to have to like, Hey, I’ll stand side by side with atheists and everybody, let’s stop the child abuse. Also realizing that we need to understand where this is coming from. And in the same way that I stand with atheists against whatever, like murder, Right? That at some level we have to realize this is a very dark satanic attack against human life. And let’s understand what brought us to this if we’re ever going to recover. Because I do think it’s, say it strikes me as the pedophilia was on the rise in the nineties. I don’t know if you remember this. It was getting quite-
Cy Kellett :
Yeah, it was trying to get good press.
Don Johnson:
It was getting good press. And thankfully we stopped that because it was-
Cy Kellett :
But that-
Don Johnson:
This is what we need to do again.
Cy Kellett :
Yeah. Say no, say no. Have some place where you’ll say, No, we’ve got to stop.
Don Johnson:
And you’ll see again the pedophilia, the is on the rise. This is a pedophilia movement we’re talking about here. So at some level we have to stop all of it, realizing where it’s coming from. But even on a very practical level, we are talking about mutilating children right now. So yes, just like enough is enough.
Cy Kellett :
And if you won’t say no to this, what will you say no
Don Johnson:
To? Well, and that’s
Cy Kellett :
What’s it going to take to get you to alienate a few people on Facebook? What is it going to take? And if it’s not this, I don’t know what it’ll take-
Don Johnson:
Which hopefully the movie will help add, because I do think there are people who are out there saying, Well, I mean the trans issue. I know that guy down the street who’s lived with his partner and he dresses seems like a nice guy. And Hey, who am I? That’s not, that’s we’re talking about here. This is about the kids and it’s, Yeah, it’s incredibly dark and evil. So yeah, absolutely. We need to frame it that way.
Cy Kellett :
Dysconnected is the name of the movie. Tell us where we can see it and where we can learn about it.
Don Johnson:
So the first chance to see it, unless you are a special person like Ct Kettlebell, who gets the preview, is on October 8th, the same day this rally’s going to take place by the way, if you want details on that, I’m happy to provide them. But Saturday night, October 8th, at Christ Cathedral in Orange County, California, Garden Grove, California, beautiful campus. They have a beautiful building there called the Cultural Center that was used in Star Trek for Space Command. And the basement of that is a lovely theater. And so it’s going to be a fantastic, And there’s
Cy Kellett :
Plenty of parking there. Plenty of I love that place.
Don Johnson:
Oh, it’s amazing. Orange County
Cy Kellett :
Large place with plenty of parking.
Don Johnson:
Totally. And we’ll have a red carpet there for you to take your picture on the red carpet. You can talk to several of the people that are in the movie, including the main girl whose story we-
Cy Kellett :
Oh, she’s going to be there?
Don Johnson:
She’s going to be there. It’s going to be fantastic.
Cy Kellett :
Oh, that’s wonderful.
Don Johnson:
Several other detransitioners even who are not in the movie, but who you’ve maybe seen on Fox News and other places are actually going to attend as well. So it should be really cool evening. And then after that you’ll be able to stream it around the world at runawayplanetpictures.com. Okay. You can go to DonJohnsonmedia.com if that’s easier to remember.
Cy Kellett :
You could get a group together and screen the.
Don Johnson:
Stream. So on demand? Yes. You could totally get a group together and we will do a screening for you. I’ll come to your church or we’ll set you up with a screening. Absolutely. You can do that too. But
Cy Kellett :
But You can just buy it like a streaming movie.
Don Johnson:
But you can buy it like on Yeah, like you would on Netflix or whatever
Cy Kellett :
You could put it on with your teenagers. You didn’t make the movie a movie that you can’t watch with teenagers.
Don Johnson:
I think you should watch it with your teenage prob. Well, probably at least not maybe the young, Young, I don’t. Depends on the situation, but parents for sure.
Cy Kellett :
Yeah. Yeah. And because I think narrative is the thing that works in adolescence primarily, that if there’s a character that I can sympathize with and empathize with, then my whole view will change. And you certainly, the whole film is built around one such person. Yeah. Person that really root for
Don Johnson:
And you can’t argue a story, right? You can’t argue with her experience. And also, by the way, let me throw out, if you are still a DVD person, and I actually think that in this kind of movie, you should probably get a hard copy of it because in a digital age where this topic, they’ll do their best I’d hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but they’ll try to keep you from it digitally. Having a hard copy is a good idea. Ignatius Press will be selling the hard copies. You can pre-order them already at ignatius.com.
Cy Kellett :
Don Johnson, you’ve done so much good work, so many good films, this is among the most important things you’ve ever done. Dysconnected is the name of the movie. Say the website again.
Don Johnson:
Again. So you can go to donjohnsonmedia.com. Yeah, you can go to Dysconnected movie. It’s Dysconnected with a Y as in dysphoria. That will get you there. Planetpictures.com will also get you there.
Cy Kellett :
Thank you, Don.
Don Johnson:
Thank you, sir.
Cy Kellett :
Thank you for joining us for this bonus episode of Catholic Answer’s Focus. We hope that you found it helpful. You will certainly find the movie helpful. So many things come into perspective when we see them on the human level, rather than just on the level of propaganda and arguing and memes and whatnot to actually meet the people. And that’s something Don’s very, very good at in his filmmaking.
If you’d like to respond to this episode or any other episode we’ve done, maybe suggest a future episode or a future guest. You can always contact us by sending an email to focus@catholic.com. Focus@catholic.com and wherever you’re watching or listening, if you give us that five star review, maybe a few nice words. It does help to grow the podcast and we’ll see you next time. God willing, right here on Catholic Answer’s Focus.