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Richard Helppie
Hello. Welcome to The Common Bridge, I'm your host, Rich Helppie. We've got with us today, Larry Shell. Larry is a writer on Substack, and he writes with great clarity. He identifies himself as a TERG - a trans-exclusionary radical gay. He writes under a heading called Renz in the Woods; like a forest. Today we're going to just talk a little bit about Larry's personal journey, some of the things that he sees happening in the LGB - or as some people like to say, LGBTQIA+ communities - and his perspectives. So joining us today on The Common Bridge, Larry Shell. Larry, good to see you. How are you today?
Larry Shell
I'm good. Thank you for having me.
Richard Helppie
Larry, our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. If you don't mind, where did you grow up and what were some of the experiences you've had? What kind of work did you do? I know you spent some time in the Navy and elsewhere, but maybe just introduce yourself to our audience.
Larry Shell
Okay, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. I'm in my 60s now. I recognized that I was gay at the age at which the hormones kick in, roughly sixth grade. Normally, boys notice other girls and I recognized I was noticing other boys. I believed at the time - this would have been in the 70s - that I understood what that meant, but I also believe that I was probably the only one for who knows how big of a distance. That's not all gay male experiences, particularly in my age bracket. It turns out there were a number of other kids in my grade that by the time they were in adulthood, recognized their sexuality. Had I approached any of them in sixth or seventh grade, they would have run the other direction. So that made me a little bit on the unique side.
Richard Helppie
Must have been a scary and lonely time.
Larry Shell
Yes and no. I was raised Roman Catholic. The way that I would define it is that I understood what the culture was saying, and I understood who I was and I chose me, and decided that this is who I am and the culture be damned. That played out with the fact that, despite that I was in honors levels classes, I was a bit of a rebel in my own way, to sort of rebel against expectations, knowing that I would never be good enough I thought. Because the high school that I went to in the Chicago area was a very large high school, there was a lot of theater. A number of plays were put on each year, and I found that as a really good outlet. Ironically, with me talking with you today, I was incredibly shy, and theater in high school helped me kind of come out of that shell, if you will. I'm still very much an introvert, and I think people expect introverts to be very quiet and reserved, but through the theater experience, I learned how to get on a stage, if you will, and be myself and not be too terrified of that. For a while there I thought that's what I wanted to be when I grew up. One thing led to another. It was senior year of high school and as the oldest child, my parents left me to sort of figure things out myself. They would always say I was the experimental model, oldest of four kids, and I hadn't really done anything about getting myself into a college and here I was, finishing high school. My options became very limited at that point, because of some of the issues in my family's household. I decided in 1981 I needed just to leave. 1981 at the time seemed like any other year. However, if I had packed a bag and headed to either coast, I'm not sure I would be here today to talk with you. Instead, I was very cautious, and I went into the military as my way to get out of home. I figured it gave me money, put a roof over my head, food in my belly, and that was possibly my saving grace, because it kept me occupied well into the '80s as the whole HIV-AIDS epidemic unfolded. That's how I ended up in the Navy. While I was in the Navy, I took SAT tests, and I applied for a scholarship to be an officer in the military, specifically the Navy. I was accepted. I got admitted to Northwestern University, and my enlistment was technically put on hold, assuming I would finish this program and then graduate and be commissioned a naval officer. While I was at Northwestern, my junior year in '86, an individual figured out that I was gay, and he freaked out and filed a report on me. Very quickly, the wheels of bureaucracy started to turn, and in the end, I was separated from the Navy. My understanding is I was the first naval midshipman that they had to figure out what to do with under the circumstances, and my case was sent all the way up to John Layman, secretary of the Navy's desk. And in the end, I was discharged from the whole thing honorably, but had to figure out how to finish my education on my own. At that point, in hindsight, it wasn't a bad thing. By the time this was happening, I wasn't 100% sure I really wanted to be in the Navy, and I certainly didn't want to be in the Navy under lock. I could have denied this. I could have tried to fight it, and then I would have spent my entire naval career at that time being observed, and this was prior even to President Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." It was strictly you weren't supposed to be gay or lesbian in the military; there were regular - what we would call - witch hunts that would go down. So in that moment, I was like, yeah, no, I'm done with this.
Richard Helppie
What a horrible experience. Was there anything that would have prevented you from serving or deploying? You didn't have any medical condition. My understanding is that they can't deploy a soldier or sailor that even has, like a toothache - I've been talking to some military people in background in preparation for this interview. It doesn't sound like you had anything that would have prevented you from being deploy-able. Nothing that involved your service, nothing. It was just somebody being a busy body, getting into your personal life and disrupting your naval career.
Larry Shell
Yeah, it was more complicated than that. He wasn't exactly being a busy body. He was actually sending out what I would call mixed signals. And so it was a question of, are you on my team or are you not on my team? And ironically, I still am not sure that he doesn't have his own bisexuality or something all these years later. I wouldn't know, I don't have contact with him. But it wasn't just somebody being a busy body and there was beer involved.
Richard Helppie
As a sailor, I would be very disappointed if there wasn't beer involved. I'm not a sailor. I just had some time last week with a friend of mine that was deployed on a carrier, and one of the tales he told me - said he was in good with whomever did this - but they would fly the helicopter off the ship before they got to port so they could buy beer for the crew when they got in. Apparently, the notion about... maybe there could be a different episode where we'll talk about drunken sailors and the like. But you, you had your experiences, and separated under honorable conditions.
Larry Shell
Yes, and to just clarify that this was an era where this was an absolute rule. You could not be gay or lesbian in the military. I'm sure that at the time of my enlistment, I acknowledged that I was not, or signed some paperwork that I was not. I did allow the folks at Northwestern from the Navy to jump to the conclusion that this was me just coming out of the closet, which truly wasn't the case. I was very much aware of myself going all the way back to sixth grade. But my life kind of unfolded and there I was, and this seemed to be the next path until it wasn't available to me. But otherwise I would have been an ensign on board a surface warfare ship after 1987, so there was nothing else about me that would have kept me from doing that.
Richard Helppie
So you faced real discrimination, not what you did, not what you said, but as you said, for who you are. Now it's 1987 and now you're leaving the Navy. What was the next chapter in your life?
Larry Shell
I had chosen a liberal arts degree because I thought that I had job security coming out into the Navy. That wasn't the case, so I scrambled to figure out what I would do. I actually worked initially for the Japanese government at the consulate office in Chicago for a couple years. I did a number of different jobs that didn't have much of a career path. My best friend - she still is one of my best friends - is a nurse. My mom was also a nurse, and had done that as a second career choice. Both of them said I should consider becoming a nurse. I would be good at it. So that's ultimately what I did. And I just recently - I'm retired now, with 28 years experience as a nurse - I have this belief system in which our lives unfold the way they're intended to unfold; although I get a little emotional if I'm on one of the coasts and I get to see the big Navy ships in terms of the "what if," but at the same time, I feel like my life ended up exactly how it was supposed to end up, and I was able to finish school and be my true self and not have to be closeted about it anymore. I mentioned in the bio information I provided you that one of the part time jobs that I took on senior year of college, and then for a little while after, was to work with some of the gay papers in Chicago. I wanted to include that because I wanted people that hear me today to understand that I hold the beliefs I have about what's going on with the gender identity folks and that I am gender critical, but in many ways, I'm like a typical gay guy, and that's kind of what I wanted to show by sharing that piece in my information.
Richard Helppie
That's, I think, what brought us here. Where I became aware of you, I'm a avid advocate of the new media model. I mean, the old media got us at each other's throats. It's not believable. I think we're moving to a better day, and Substack, I think, is part of that. I know this is your first time in an interview like this, but we've had some others, like we had Matt Taibbi on early and some other people that have become real luminaries. Now I'm not promising that for being a guest on The Common Bridge, but your writing is really good, and you've got a very unique perspective. I would encourage people to subscribe to Renz in the Woods, Larry Shell, on Substack. Larry, maybe we could just jump there. You're not a social media guy, but you decided that you had something to say, and Substack was the place to say it. What brought you to this conclusion? Just in this little time we've had together, you must have had more than a one second thought about putting yourself out there like this.
Larry Shell
I used to be a social media guy. I used to have the whole collection of the different platforms out there, but I was disappointed over time, as they evolved into these situations where, like you described and as far as I'm concerned, for example, Facebook, the algorithms on Facebook are designed to pit us against each other for clicks and likes and whatnot. I encountered numerous people that their sole purpose seemed to be just to be contrary and angry and hateful. So one by one, I dropped all of those. At the point that I came to Substack, which wasn't very long ago, I had discovered LGB Alliance United States, which is a US offshoot of an organization that started in Britain, of lesbian, gay, bisexual people wishing to separate themselves from the ever growing alphabet soup, recognizing an inherent difference between the core group historically and all of these other identity driven letters that keep getting longer and longer. I decided to commit to giving them money. I'm a bit of a cheapskate, so that speaks loudly that I decided to give them money. And through that, instead of receiving their videos through the email, it said we're on Substack. I had no idea what Substack was till I encountered it by trying to just keep up with these weekly emails from LGB Alliance. It didn't take long to figure out that this was a much freer environment where people could speak without constantly being censored in some of those other platforms, up to and including comments on YouTube. I'm not even sure at this point if it isn't just a computer algorithm that recognizes certain phrases and just wipes your comments clean which was very frustrating. And so to be able to speak freely on an issue that has bothered me for quite some time was very refreshing. And clearly, as you discovered, I have a lot to say. What I've discovered on Substack is the notes, which is similar to sort of a Twitter format, if you will. But then it also has the newsletter ability, which is almost like a blog function. And for myself, what seems to be happening is my newsletters are autobiographical written pieces - incidentally, my liberal arts degree was English so that's helped me develop my writing skills - but the note comments are where I specifically address my take on the gender ideology, and although I'm very outspoken, I try not to be just hateful about it. For me, it's more complicated than we're being led to believe. It was just amazing to have that ability. And then I've had a fairly decent response. I would still classify my social footprint, even on Substack, as being in the small category, but that's okay. It's much more than I ever anticipated, but that is how I came to be where I'm at on Substack. There's a term "peak trans" which is where folks identify the point at which they cross the line and say, wait a minute, this is too much. I was working as a clinic nurse on the west side of Chicago, and my peak trans moment was when they implemented all the language changing so that we no longer referred to this one gal as the maternal child nurse, because maternal was now considered a bad word, and they were basically bending over backwards to make all of this inclusive language for a group of individuals that has to be incredibly tiny compared to all the female patients that are now not able to be referred to as mothers, for example. I'm not suggesting that any individual does not deserve to be treated respectfully when they go to their doctors. Everybody where they are at in their lives deserves to be treated appropriately. I just didn't understand the need to reinvent the language to that extent, and that, for me, was a deciding factor, and that right away, you were not allowed to question it at all. That, of course, has carried over to all different kinds of places in our culture right now. That was one of the problems I have with this, is that almost immediately, any questions or challenges were completely shut down.
Richard Helppie
And in one of your first pieces I read you defined the binary, and I'm like, this guy really brought this thing home. We've had great people on our show talking about transgenderism. We've talked about what the surgeries actually do, and that they actually don't work, and we still have 100% of people saying, look, we have compassion for people that are born with different chromosome mixes, and perhaps both male and female genitalia and such, that does occur in nature, but it's occurred since the beginning of time and medically and socially, we know how to deal with that. But then you get phenomena of people saying my perfectly normal 13 year old came home and said they want to be referred to by a different gender and do surgeries that will alter their life for good, and if anybody says anything against that, well maybe they'll commit suicide; nobody was asking the second question, what other threats from a child would you capitulate to under the threat of suicide? But anyway, you define the binary, and I thought you did a brilliant job with that. I know you've written a lot since then, but if I can put you on the spot for just a moment, if you would not mind sharing your view on that with the listeners, readers and viewers of The Common Bridge.
Larry Shell
First of all, the whole situation that we're dealing with has gotten to be very multi-layered and very complicated, and I don't think it needs to be. But in anticipation of responding to your question, if we look at the different civil rights movements in our history, you look at how long it took black Americans to get to the 1960s and in the midst of the equal rights fight for black Americans, that was one place that closeted gay Americans and lesbian Americans could fight for another group, since they can't fight for themselves. And out of that, the Stonewall riot occurred in 1969 and suddenly, now you had this LGB fight for equal rights, and we achieved what we set out to achieve in a generation or two, next to the black civil rights movement that took significant amount of time. So part of the culture was prepped and ready for the next civil rights agenda. We achieved gay marriage. I prefer to say marriage equality, but for clarification, gay marriage will do in a pinch. You had these big organizations that had grown up in the gay community fighting for all of these agendas that we achieved. Their very existence needed to change gears, and that is from a bureaucratic standpoint, I think, where the whole trans thing started to take off. And before we knew what was happening, a significant part of the culture just wanted to be on board. Of course, we want to support everybody. But along the way came some mistakes, from my perspective, and how we deal with the gender binary is one of the biggest of those mistakes. The concept of a gender identity, which is essentially this thing inside of us that is completely separate from our bodies but innately tells us inside where we are, male, female, and, of course, now a variety of other things tagging on the idea of a gender identity. In my opinion, that's not a real thing. Or I should say, it's no more a real thing than all of the other aspects of how we put together and build and create our self-identity. So I have a snarky comment that says, perhaps we should have dietary identity as one of the next things we look at, that vegans are inherently vegan, and therefore they're a subclass and need to be protected. We do all kinds of things as we grow and develop in our lives to put together our self-identity, none of which is innate inside of us. Somewhere that is language that frankly, is comparable to the Christian idea of a soul, which is a theological, philosophical concept. And anybody who argues for the existence of the soul would not turn around and demand everyone in their culture affirm the reality of their soul. It's a personal faith kind of statement. Biologically, as a mammalian species on this planet, we are divided into two sexes. Originally “sex” and then "gender" was used as a secondary way of saying "sex" because we're a little bit twitchy when we get to talking about anything erotic or sexual or anything like that. That's how gender crept in. There are different ways that people try to explain the binary. I've read that strictly looking at XX-XY chromosomes isn't as perfect a way to define it, because there are other mammalian species where the combination is reversed, and female have the opposite than the male do. There are a lot more aberrations or anomalies that can creep in, and yet the person is still one or the other of the binary. And that's really the reality of the situation as I see it. We are biological creatures. Our sense of consciousness emerges from the millions of neurons in our brains, our bodies. Anything that's going on in our brains comes out of the neurons in our brains. I'm not suggesting that some of these individuals do not perceive themselves to be dramatically different than how they see the cultural norms of the binary, but it is not based on some sort of gender identity existing in their bodies that they are responding to. They're responding to the culture. They're responding to all kinds of things I'm trying to pull in from the different things that I've talked about, so bear with me here.
Richard Helppie
Look, I think you're making a strong point that there are biological, immutable, unchangeable, inarguable facts that we deal with. I did not realize you had this medical background as you're describing this; I can see those qualifications coming out loud and clear. Thank you for that. When you think about a person's perception and how they process things as the peak trans is hitting throughout our society, let's say Western society for short and scope, we're coming out now that there's such a high correlation with childhood trauma, there's a high correlation with autism, there's a high correlation with PTSD, and you think about, yeah, that's kind of a normal reaction of the brain to trauma, is to try to escape it, try to become something else. And it kind of makes sense to me when I look at that statistically.
Larry Shell
One of the things that I've seen from my perspective is four different groupings of individuals who are lumped under the umbrella of trans. The first is the young children that display gender confusion, which is, I think, erroneously being called gender dysphoria. The gender confusion among the little kids, depending on the intelligence of the kid, depending on where his or her parents are at in understanding these things, and what they encourage, this is, I think, not even necessarily trauma induced. It's, I think, part of the job of little kids figuring out their place in the world and how they fit in. And the confusion is, I would argue, potentially normal ,or given the high probability that these kids will grow up, go through puberty, and when the hormones kick in, recognize that they are same sex attracted. And that's part of why I I feel very passionately about speaking out as a gay man, particularly as a gay man who, right off the bat, knew who I was. As a gay man who, as a child, was more quiet, probably deemed effeminate, and my life, if I were that kid now, might end up very different than the way it played out. There's a story that I have commented on. I lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for about 20 years. The UP is beautiful country. It's very much rural America. Marquette is a tiny bit of urbanity in an otherwise very rural environment. But you're still talking about a town of 25,000 people. I was open about myself. I wasn't closeted in anyway, and one of my co-workers on the floor I was working at came to me because she was very concerned. This would have been maybe like 2001 2002. This gal had four kids. She had three older daughters, and then a young son, who at the time was probably three and a half or four. They lived about maybe ten miles out of Marquette, a couple miles out of the closest little town. So this little guy's primary social life revolved around his family and his three older sisters. And of course, in a household with three older sisters, there were all kinds of amazingly fun things for him to play with, which involved tutus and princess stuff and sparkly stuff. And he was very much obsessed as kids that age can become obsessed with wearing the tutu, wearing the princess hat. Her husband was beside himself, and she came to me to seek my advice if I thought that her little guy was going to end up gay. What I explained to her back then, almost 25 years ago, was there's a significant correlation among adult gay men with cross-dressing behavior as kids, almost universal. However, the flip side is not true. Every single child out there that investigates gender and plays around with these things is not destined to be gay. And what I said to her was, continue to have your husband keep his mouth shut, leave the little guy alone. Why wouldn't he be fascinated by sparkle and color and all of this stuff, he's looking at his siblings as role models, and they were all three girls. I said, wait until he starts school. Once he starts school and starts to meet other kids, his idea of the culture will expand, and I guarantee this stuff will go by the wayside. And that is what happened. I saw her many years later. I asked her how he was doing, and he was, at the time, on the high school football team. And she said, You are absolutely right. And she said, but I have some amazingly good blackmail pictures, if he ever gets out of line. [Laughter.] And I use that story not as, look at the truth, my big issue when it comes to the children that are being pushed into transitioning is that most of them are going to grow out of this. A significant portion of the little boys may end up gay. They need to go through puberty, and that is the first age group of kids when we talk about the whole umbrella. The second concerning group of kids is essentially middle class adolescent females who now have started puberty and are horrified at how they are treated with their developing breasts and their rapidly sexing bodies, and they see a culture that glorifies this airbrush ideal feminine thing, and they experience body dysmorphia, which I think is probably almost universal. Show me an adolescent male or female who does not look at what's happening to their bodies and think, Oh, dear God. Unfortunately now there is - this is where the idea of social contagion comes in - this whole wonderful script for them saying, but you don't have to do this. You can escape this. The statistics are boggling when you look on a graph, for example, of this huge spike. They even had to create a fake psychological explanation and call it rapid onset gender dysphoria. But we've dealt with this kind of social contagion all the way back to Salem. When you read modern histories of what happened with the Salem witch trials and executions it was probably an episode of social contagion where one or two of the girls in that age group talked about witchcraft and everything and suddenly, throughout Salem, more and more girls were responding to it. And yet those in the gender identity crowd refused to see this as somehow unusual or strange. A significant number of the de-transitioners, which are individuals that transition to a certain extent, possibly begin taking cross sex hormones, may even - if there are some of the ones that had breast removal done – a significant percentage of the de-transitioners are coming from this cohort of adolescent females that suddenly are regretting what they did five years, seven years, eight years down the road. The third category of people that I see, I haven't read as much about this category, so maybe this is strictly my own observation. This group would be the young, maybe 20 somethings, and I see them as gay men or lesbians who have failed to launch as gay men or lesbians. They are not completely comfortable with their sexuality. In the greater culture around them is this wonderful, wonderful party called Trans, that, frankly, has re-established much stricter concepts of gender norms. Gay men and lesbians in my age bracket, spent the better part of two generations trying to get people to understand and broaden what it means to be a man what it means to be a woman, so that there's plenty of room for how you express all of that. I have a very dear friend in Missouri and she even acknowledges now that by the current definitions, it's possible that she would be considered trans. She doesn't consider herself trans, but her entire life, she's just been very masculine in the clothes she wears, has always preferred pickup trucks and farm animals. She was a pathologist for a number of years, and now she's broadened in her later years, has taken on a church function in addition to her pathology role. She was just being a woman who tends to be a little on the butch side and is otherwise heterosexual and lives in the country. By the gender identity crowd's definition, well, maybe she's actually trans, and that is where you hear criticism of the gender identity people as being almost regressive in how they see the gender roles. So I see this third group of adults as transitioning to get away from their underlying same sex attraction. Then the final category is almost exclusively older men, heterosexual older men, men like Bruce Jenner, Caitlin Jenner, men like the assistant secretary of whatever the heck she was in the Biden administration. These are men that may have adult children, and this is where the concept of autogynephilia enters into the discussion. My understanding is there's a TV program called White Lotus. I'm not familiar with it. There was an episode not too long ago where one of the heterosexual male characters is given an autogynephilia story line. Autogynephilia, you may find very different definitions out there based on who you talk to. The understanding that I have is it's a man who is obsessed with the idea of himself as a woman, and there are those that will say that it's an obsession that is based on erotic sensibilities. I'm not sure I'd like to limit it to a purely erotic attraction.
Richard Helppie
I've read a little bit about that phenomena, and it's not, at the moment, diagnosed as a specific psychiatric malady. But it may not necessarily be. It may be that it's what flips someone's switch in a sexual way.
Larry Shell
Rich, I think it may very well be included in the DSM under philias as a more umbrella term.
Richard Helppie
My understanding is that the cleanest definition was it's men that have a fantasy about having sex as a woman. And again, kind of your point about, well, what does that mean in terms of their gender role? And, you know, people do all kinds of stuff.
Larry Shell
In my opinion that is at one end of the autogynephilia spectrum, where it is decidedly an erotic obsession that possibly involves what is called sissy porn. Sissy porn is a category of pornography in which a male is dressed in female attire, and then is - in gay parlance we call him the bottom - the active partner in oral sex and the passive partner in anal sex, and then possibly even wishing to live out that fantasy, if you will. But I find the erotic piece of it, to that extent, limiting. I think that there are autogynephiles where they're still very much obsessed with themselves as a woman, whether or not they've progressed to a point of eroticizing the fantasy, but it's definitely an obsession. When you're an autogynephile you don't like anything that challenges your delusion of yourself as a woman. And I think that some of the loudest and most vocal critics of trans women out there on TikTok and some of the other platforms, are very much enmeshed in this obsession with themselves as a woman. The few trans individuals that I have known over the course of my life are so different from these individuals it's like night and day. Historically, an individual would go through a couple years of therapy...
Richard Helppie
Let me react to that just a little bit, that this notion that a person could be chemically and then surgically transformed into a Jennifer Lopez or Sofia Vergara and draw that kind of attention, is utterly ridiculous. I think you and I agree that it doesn't matter if somebody wants to present however they want to present and they want to be in a more traditional role of the opposite gender, full fledged adults in their world - fine. But I think the push-back as I read it is that, okay, fine, if that's what you want to do, but that doesn't mean, for example, we're going to take away women's spaces; dressing rooms, athletic competitions.
Larry Shell
That's where that autogynephilia piece comes into play. Because what I was leading up to is exactly what you're bringing up, that the reason why there's this intense demand for access to female spaces, the whole concept behind a trans woman as a woman is because erotic or not, these autogynephiles will not tolerate anything that challenges them and their delusion that they are a woman, and that's some of the most vicious loud. That's where I see that connection that you bring up.
Richard Helppie
When we began covering this story, the first person we had on was - and we didn't intend to cover this much, it just kind of worked that way - Trisha Posner, who came out and said, look, you can't erase women. Have your life but why is the doctor that's treating me for breast cancer suddenly referring to me having chest cancer. She was very brave, she was ridiculed. Her husband, a renowned investigative journalist, Gerald Posner, has written on this topic. Leor Sapir was on this program talking about these issues, and I think this is where people are drawing the line, like, hey, have your life. There are people that we know who are genuinely of a different sex and different gender than what they were born with. It does happen. It happens in nature. And those folks that I've known in my life, starting at the age of 14, they just want to live their life. They didn't demand that the whole world capitulate to their view. The other part that I wanted to get into with you, because you've got this medical background - I think we're going to have to have you back to cover everything on The Common Bridge - that the surgeries don't really work, that a male trying to go to female, that the vagina, or whatever they call it today, their body treats it like a wound the rest of their life and tries to close it. And as a person that has dealt with inpatient sepsis, for a woman to have a penis, first, they have to pick whether it's going to be always erect or always flaccid, depending if they want to use it for penetrative sex or for standing up to urinate, but they actually have to connect a plastic tube to the urethra, and of course, that's the source of infection, so they live a life of constant hormone treatment and constant antibiotics.
Larry Shell
I recently saw a statistic that up to 75% of the vagina to penis surgery has complications. But this is also why it's a relatively small number of individuals that actually follow through with bottom surgery. Of course, that's where now we hit the brick wall of allowing these individuals into female protected space with their male genitalia intact, and everything starts to just get incredibly complicated. I would say also to you, based on something you just said, the trans individuals that I knew before this era, before the 2010 plus era, they never fancied that they had become the opposite gender. They were transitioning to alleviate their gender dysphoria. They had as a goal the ability to pass, and actually, there are some trans identified men out there who come darn close to Jennifer Lopez and some of these others. But that's not the norm necessarily. That's the exception, and it comes after many expensive, self-paid plastic surgeries to make that happen. But yes, and I have to be honest, I never would have thought when we started talking that I have enough to say, that I might need to come back. [Laughter.] But now that you got me started...
Richard Helppie
One anecdote is that I met a young woman one time with a group of friends, and her story was she was born with male genitalia. As she hit puberty, without any hormones or treatment, she began to develop breasts, began to develop a voice of a female, and she was like going into the ninth or 10th grade, and had to drop out of school because the boys were being attracted to her. Not everything worked in terms of her male anatomy, and every motion, every part of her was absolutely female, but was about to undergo treatment to correct that. I understand that person. That makes 100% sense, but like when a whole class of eighth graders decide they're a different gender, no.
Larry Shell
One thing, though, that I will add is that intersex as a label is actually a misleading label in the era prior to all the genetic technology and all the different abilities we have now for diagnostic tests. You pretty much were faced with an individual born with ambiguous genitalia, and doctors tried to guess based on what they thought they were looking at. Almost all intersex individuals are actually on the binary although they may have sort of proto gonads of the opposite sex; those secondary set of the opposite are generally not as developed as their primary set. The ability of the primary set of gonads to be functional may or may not be present. Oftentimes, an overly enlarged clitoris is seen as the penis. But that's where another piece of this is that the gender identity people want to grab onto and embrace these biologic anomaly individuals, and suddenly turn that into a spectrum, which I find really ridiculous. You can't take a few biological anomalies and then suddenly you have a spread of variation from it. I'm feeling under the gun time-wise; there are so many things I want to say.
Richard Helppie
Let's do this: what's the big point for this episode that you'd like to leave our listeners and our readers and viewers with and then we will schedule a follow up, because I do believe you have a lot to say, and you're not only a wonderful writer, but you're a very articulate speaker with maybe a book's worth of things. I think your voice is very important, and I'm honored that you would come to The Common Bridge after you're famous. Please remember us so that we can have another interview. (Larry Shell: Absolutely.) Again, for everybody, it's Larry Shell, his Substack is Renz in the Woods. Larry take us home. What are some final thoughts for today that you'd like to leave with the listeners, readers and viewers of The Common Bridge?
Larry Shell
I know that the focus of your podcast is to determine the middle ground and is what is sorely lacking right now on this issue. What we have is two very extremes. We're stuck in the middle between political opportunism on the right to use this to gain ground, and the extreme gender identity people on the left that say you have to accept everything that we are positioning and putting forward, or you're a transphobe. I believe children should be allowed to grow, develop and go through puberty, and that puberty, in and of itself, sorts out a lot of the gender confusion. I do believe that female space needs to be protected. I do not buy that the gender identity is a real thing. It's a subjective, self-described way of thinking about oneself that does not grant you the right to female only space. The third piece is, I want to see that we stop policing language, because that's the other piece, the gender identity crowd is wanting to police everybody else's language to affirm themselves. And then that is my fourth point; as a gay man, growing up in the 70s and 80s, I didn't have role models. I couldn't turn on a TV set. There was no internet. I just had to figure myself out on my own, I did not rely on affirmation from people around me, and I still don't need affirmation. It's ironic that the affirmation that I would potentially seek would be coming from my fellow gay brothers that may not agree with me on this issue. But stop the need for cultural affirmation from the rest of us, be yourself, live your life. Whether I accept you or not, is irrelevant. So that's where I would leave it.
Richard Helppie
Larry, I just have to say, I think that is brilliant. Affirmation isn't necessary if you know who you are and that is an outstanding and fresh point of view. It's one that I think it'd be difficult for anyone to argue with, and that's what we're doing here on The Common Bridge. We invite our growing list of readers, listeners and viewers to tell other people. I look forward to the publication of this and today, with our guest, Larry Shell of the popular Substack page, Renz in the Woods, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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