Audio only:
Is there really an epidemic of hate against the trans community? Are delayed “gender affirming surgeries” leading to widespread trans suicides? Are we facing a trans “genocide”?
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I think one of the conversations we’re not doing really well on right now is this debate on transgenderism.
CLIP:
You cut that out now or you’ll go home in an
Joe:
Ambulance. Yeah, that seems mildly
CLIP:
Inappropriate for a political discussion.
Joe:
There are at least three features of the debate that I think would be surprising to an outsider learning about it for the first time. First, it’s an area where we should be agreeing quite a bit, but we’re really not. Some debates are hard because two different groups just want incompatible goals. You’ve got to balance the interests of business, say with the interests of the environmental protection groups. Those debates are tricky because we have different goals, we’ve got different outcomes we’re trying to achieve. But here in a real sense, both sides of the trans debate are pursuing the same goal. We’re wanting the same thing. We want what is best for people who are struggling with gender dysphoria. We want what’s best for people who feel like their psychological gender doesn’t match their biological sex. We want people to feel at home and at peace and their bodies, and we can forget that this is what people on the other side want too.
But it’s second. There’s a kind of radicalism in the trans movement that even the movement’s allies find alarming. The New York Times, for instance, recently observed that the LGBT movement had to abandoned its successful strategy of pursuing incremental legal and regulatory wins in favor of a radical and unsuccessful gender ideology, and arguing that sex change operations should be available to small children. To take just one example of this kind of radicalism, there’s been something of a turf war between transgender activists and old school feminists, but the old school feminists take the position that biological men can’t be women. Now, for that view, trans activists have been calling them turfs, which is short for trans exclusionary radical feminists suggesting that such a view is outside the mainstream spoilers. It’s not. And so in 2023, the London Trans Pride Parade invited a violent, convicted criminal to speak who proposed this solution for dealing with such stubborn women?
CLIP:
I was going to come here and be really fluffy and be really nice and say, yeah, be really lovely and queer and gay. No. If you see a turf punch him in. The
Joe:
What’s remarkable is the response of the crowd cheering as a biological male urges violence against women. Remarkable as well was the very decision by London Trans pride to choose as one of their speakers in the first place, somebody with a history of kidnapping, torture, and attempted murderer to platform them as a speaker. It doesn’t look like normal politics. The third surprising feature is that people just seem afraid to express their true beliefs on this question even when their beliefs are completely, utterly mainstream. Three years ago, the journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell moderated a discussion on transgender athletes for the MIT Sloan Conference. The sports scientist, Ross Tucker argued that men and women were biologically different in ways that mattered for sports. But as Gladwell admitted to Tucker, three years later, the conference organizers had stacked the panel against him and really against their own audience.
CLIP:
They stacked against you, Ross. They put a trans athlete and a trans advocate, and you on the panel, and I was the moderator. And it was one of those strange situations where my suspicion is that 90% of the people in the audience were on your side, but 5% of the audience was willing to admit it.
Joe:
But it wasn’t just that Gladwell believed most people in the audience secretly disagreed with the trans agenda, but were afraid to say so. He described himself as being cowed as well.
CLIP:
The reason I’m ashamed of my performance of that panel, because I share your position a hundred percent, and I was count the idea of saying anything on this issue, I believe in retrospect, in a dishonest way, I was objective in a dishonest way. I let a lot of really howler pass without comment.
Joe:
So how have we arrived at a place where radical politics seem mainstream and people are afraid to express mainstream ideas or to tell the truth about men and women? I want to suggest that there’s a climate of fear that’s emerged, and really on both sides of the question, more specifically, I think that a lot of people on the trans side of the equation have believed two important falsehoods. Number one, there’s a narrative that there’s an epidemic of near genocidal violence against the trans community. Number two, there’s a narrative that sex change operations need to be performed on minors, even prepubescent minors or else there’ll be a genocide of suicide. Now, thankfully, both of these fears are false as we’re going to see, but in fairness, if you believe these falsehoods, if you identify as trans or an ally and you feel like your life or your identity, your group, your friends are under this kind of eliminationist attack, look, it makes sense that you might behave in ways that seem irrational to the rest of the world, and that reaction might itself make other people feel less comfortable, openly disagreeing with you on your political views.
So I think to try to solve this at least a little bit, let’s look closely at the heart of these two fears and hopefully dispel them so we can have maybe a more productive dialogue in the future. Now, before I do that, before I delve into those fears, I do want to quickly thank everybody who supports me over@shamelessjoe.com, because truly your direct support really keeps the ministry going, keeps our production quality as high as we can. And if you want to support Shameless Pope’s mission, I dare you to do so over@shamelessjoe.com. Okay, number one, an epidemic of violence. One of the existential threats that the trans community perceives is of outsiders killing them. For instance, scholars like Jeremy Kidd and Taran Whitten have argued that transgender hate crimes in the US and abroad constitute genocide. And each year human rights campaign puts out these sensationalist year-end reports like this one declaring in 2024 that there was an epidemic of taking the lives of trans and gender expansive people.
They actually claimed there was a similar epidemic in 2023 and in 2022 and in 2021. But what was new in 2023 is they now claim that there is a national state of emergency facing the transgender community in the United States. So in the past two years, how many fatal hate crimes did the FBI record against trans and gender expansive people? Zero. None at all. How are groups like human rights campaign finding evidence for this epidemic? Well, they’re rebranding various crimes as anti-trans hate crimes, even if there’s no evidence of that, and even if there’s really good evidence to the contrary. For instance, in Massachusetts, a man killed his teenage girlfriend. The human rights campaign rebranded it as an anti-trans hate crime because the girl sometimes used they them pronouns. Or in Ohio, a homeless man killed another homeless person he believed had stolen from him. HRC though called it anti-trans hate, despite the police finding no link to hate or bias in the crime, and in fact, a clear motive to the contrary.
In North Carolina, a 31-year-old man murdered his estranged ex and HRC also labeled this as anti-trans hate. Now, look, cases like these are tragedies. These people need our sympathy and our prayers. And as we’re going to see there are real links between transgenderism mental illness and substance abuse. It’s easy to see how somebody mentally disturbed and addicted to drugs can find themselves in a vulnerable and dangerous place in our society. They deserve our compassion, but it is not clear that any of those cases or many others like them have the first thing to do with anti-trans hate. And so the story of the wouldbe genocide doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. What about the second possible genocide? The sort of suicide genocide in response to laws that would keep biologically male athletes out of women’s sports and would prohibit sex change operations for minors? A transgendered correspondent for Vox suggested that this might constitute genocide. Now, acknowledging that some of us might quibble about the definition, the author nuanced by suggesting it was maybe instead just mass murder that would result in a lot of trans people needlessly dying. And this idea that it is murderous to not offer sex change operations to minors is not just some fringe notion. The Biden administration’s Assistant Secretary for Health claimed much the same thing.
CLIP:
Gender affirming care is medical care. Gender affirming care is mental health care, and gender affirming care is literally suicide prevention care. This fact is well established.
Joe:
You might be asking if the medical evidence is really as clear as Admiral Levine says, that’s Admiral Levine, not Avril Levine. As Admiral Levine claims, why would anyone oppose offering it to kids? Well, according to Levine, it’s because some people just hate kids and want them to die. And a 2022 speech at Texas Christian University, Admiral Levine said that those who now attack our LGBTQI plus community are driven by an agenda that has nothing to do with medicine, nothing to do with science, and nothing to do with warmth, empathy, compassion, or understanding. They’re rejecting the value of support of medicine rejecting while established science and rejecting basic human compassion. They prefer slander, bigotry and gender bidding hate speech. We as doctors and as people who love our communities and our nations have to confront the fact the language of care and compassion that we take for granted is being used to tear our communities apart.
The language of medicine and science is being used to drive people to suicide. The mantle of concern for children is being claimed to destroy children’s lives. Now that same year, a u gov study found that only 29% of Americans agreed with Levine that we should be giving puberty blockers to teens. A plurality 44% opposed it. Now, in Levine’s view, it’s apparently because half the country just hates kids and wants them all to be driven to suicide. And I think two things bear witnessing here. First, even if the science were as well established as Levine, as we’re going to see falsely claims, the idea that you need to agree with our agenda or we’re going to kill ourselves is textbook manipulation. And I mean that quite literally. As Michael and Jack point out in their book, clinical Strategies for Becoming a Master Psychotherapist, one of the most persuasive and effective manipulative behaviors are acts of self-harm or threats of self-harm.
But second, Admiral Levine is lying. I don’t just mean wrong, a lot of people wrongly, but innocently believed the myth that so-called gender affirming care was needed to prevent suicides. But as the New York Times reported this year, there actually never was good scientific evidence that puberty blockers or hormone treatments were effective in treating gender dysphoria. And Levine knew this in the words of the New York Times. The much cited consensus of medical associations was a mirage. Since few of the groups endorsing gender affirming care had actually conducted their own in-depth evidence reviews instead, medical groups were simply repeating what they were hearing from the world of professional association for transgender health or wpath. But that’s not based on science. In fact, WPATH changed its policy after the US government, more specifically when Admiral Levine personally intervened to demand that even pre children should be allowed to undergo sex change procedures.
This was not a change in science. This was a political intervention. And it’s not just that Levine and WPATH were lying about the medical evidence, it’s that some of the best data that we actually have points in precisely the opposite direction. WPATH actively prevented researchers like Dr. Karen Robinson of John Hopkins from publishing data they thought would be politically disadvantageous or would negatively affect the state of transgender healthcare. Now, despite such coverups, there is a growing body of research that calls into question the effectiveness of so-called gender affirming care. For instance, in 2019, researchers reviewed 10 years of medical data for the entire population of Sweden in one of the only analysis of transgender individuals mental health treatment for depression, anxiety disorders, and suicide based on an entire country’s population. Now, their initial findings were that transgender surgeries led to better mental health outcomes and fewer suicide attempts.
And as you might imagine, this made headlines around the world. The only problem was the researchers had crunched the numbers incorrectly. Once that was pointed out to them, they were forced to concede that actually the opposite was true. There was actually no significant difference in the prevalence of treatment for mood disorders and no significant difference and the prevalence of hospitalization after suicide attempt and those who had undergone sex change operations were actually more likely to struggle with anxiety disorders later on in life. Now, somehow that correction never made international headline news. And even today, you can still find news stories presenting the erroneous conclusions that even a note that the study had been retracted and the authors had reversed their findings. So it’s not just emotional manipulation to say that you need to support sex change procedures for kids to keep them from killing themselves.
It is also literally untrue. So let’s talk about catastrophizing. Convincing people that there’s an imminent genocide of the trans community either through anti-trans lynchings or people trying to coax teenagers into suicide isn’t just wrong. It is itself dangerous. The technical term for this is catastrophizing or catastrophic thinking. It’s a cognitive distortion in which you overestimate the chances of something bad happening and exaggerate the potential negative consequences of that scenario. As the BBC knows, abundant research shows catastrophizing, composes serious threat to mental health and may also amplify feelings of distress accompanying conditions such as chronic pain. It also makes us more vulnerable to many other mental illnesses including post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder and even certain kinds of psychosis. Now, it’s possible for both individuals and groups to fall into this kind of thinking. Consider intergroup threat theory. When one group perceives another as threatening these survival of that group, it can trigger a communal sort of fight or flight response in which the group lashes out aggressively to eliminate the perceived threat. And while people often respond to threats against themselves with fear, they often respond to threats against their community with anger and aggression. So perhaps it is not surprising that if members of the trans community are being convinced that their group is being threatened with extermination, that they’re going to lash out in ways that seem disproportionately aggressive.
CLIP:
Take
Joe:
It outside. You want to call me sir again? I’ll show you a sir. I apologize. I apologize ma’am. Within the context of the trans community, the danger of catastrophizing is particularly acute given the documented prevalence of severe mental illnesses.
CLIP:
My pronouns are they them. I’m a transfeminine non-binary person and I’m autistic. I also have anxiety and depression,
And I have depression, which means sometimes I experience a total lack of motivation and periods of intense despair. I also have anxiety.
I’m non-binary, I’m autistic, and I have a DHD I’m psychosis.
Joe:
Now there ongoing debates about whether transgenderism itself should be considered a mental disorder, which is how it was classified by the World Health Organization until 2018 and by the American Psychiatric Association until 2013. But what’s certainly true is that people who believe themselves to be trans suffer from other mental illnesses at shockingly high rates. In 2019, transgender Health Medical Journal published the largest investigation of mental health diagnoses and substance use prevalence and transgender individuals. They compared patients who identified as transgender with those who didn’t and found that transgender patients had a statistically significant increase in prevalence for all psychiatric diagnoses. Query that is they weren’t just more prone to suffering from one or another mental illness, they suffered from every form of mental illness at higher rates, often astronomically higher rates. Trans identifying patients, for instance, are more than six times as likely to be schizophrenic, eight times more likely to be psychotic or bipolar, nine times more likely to be autistic, and more than 15 times more likely to have a personality disorder.
Now, the study authors seem uncomfortable with their own findings here, and they’ve suggested that this disparity might be overinflated since mental health assessments are required before starting medical interventions for transitioning. But the fact remains that most trans patients, a full 58%, have been diagnosed with at least one mental illness, not including gender dysphoria compared to under 14% for non-trans patients and other studies on the topic find much the same thing. Now, compounding this problem, trans individuals also abuse drugs and alcohol at wildly disproportionate rates as well. So the data shows us that the trans community isn’t in the kind of danger they may believe they’re in and not for the reasons they believe themselves to be. So once you get past the political propaganda and the bad data and the misrepresentations and totally different picture emerges, and hopefully a better starting place for an honest discussion, look, much of the existential anxiety that trans identifying people might feel is a result not of a genocidal campaign against him, but of political propaganda and data distortions and catastrophizing.
CLIP:
I think Donald Trump should stop booty clapping to Elon Musk and actually get something done in this country. And eradicating trans people is not going to be it. And I stand 10 toes down on that.
Joe:
We as Christians need to respond with compassion to people who are struggling with gender dysphoria, with mental health issues, with self-harm, with suicidal ideation, with substance abuse, with bullying, with homelessness, with a whole host of other self-destructive behaviors that the trans community over index is for. Those are heavy burdens individually, and when someone is dealing with maybe several of them connected to one another, that can feel overwhelming and it can feel pretty catastrophic. But don’t in the spirit of compassion, drive someone further into catastrophizing. Don’t pretend that there is an anti-trans genocide that doesn’t really exist. Don’t pretend that the people trying to call out those distortions are really part of some plot to get teenagers to commit suicide. If we’re going to make any progress at all helping people struggling with mental illnesses like this, we’ve got to start in the words of St. Paul by speaking the truth and love and look. Next week I’m going to share some practical tips for how I think we can do that on this topic. So depending on when you’re watching this video, you can either find that video or a video exploring how to talk about gay marriage right here. Either way, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and God bless you.