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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie and with us today we have a returning guest, the renowned investigative journalist and author Gerald Posner. Gerald, of course, author of many books, including the definitive "Case Closed" about the John F. Kennedy assassination, and "Killing the Dream," also the definitive work about the assassination of Martin Luther King. Mr. Posner has been very busy of late exercising his investigative journalism skills on a number of topics. Today we're going to talk about the transgender agenda and ideology and particularly about a new law that just was signed in California by Governor Gavin Newsom. Gerald, it's great to see you and welcome back to The Common Bridge.
Gerald Posner
Great to be with you, Richard. You know, one of the reasons that I'm so happy to talk to you about this on your Common Bridge, you look for meeting ground on different hot button discussions where people can come together. Just about a week or so ago, Trisha, my wife, also an author who worked on it, we had a discussion with DIAG which is a group of parents and clinicians and doctors - Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender. They think that the party's approach on gender - which we're going to talk about today - is wrong. They are so important because I think that the partisan divide that we have in this country, a lot of times you mention an issue and immediately [it] gets categorized into one group or another. So if you talk about gender and say, by the way I think that the science isn't there and that maybe children are being harmed if they're 13, 14, 15 years old, and they're making decisions that will affect the rest of their lives, somebody will say, you must be a right wing Republican. No, not at all. As a matter of fact that has nothing to do with politics. Although politics gets involved in there, it really has to do with the issue itself and that's unfortunate. If you mention the border, people immediately think you either want an open border or you want a closed border; there's no middle ground. Losing the middle is one of the worst things that's happened in this polarized atmosphere that we are living in, because people jump to their corners immediately and defend positions without looking at the information and data. That's really unfortunate because I'm sort of evidence driven, [if] you want to change my mind on a conclusion I've reached, okay, I'll be open to it but you need to present the evidence to me as to why I'm wrong. And if you can and I see that credible evidence and I say, okay, I didn't realize that, then I'll move my position. But you can't just do it by shouting. It's unfortunate [that] gender is one of those issues. I've seen it. I know from the direct messages I get, in the emails I get, there are a lot of people that respond automatically by saying, oh, you're transphobic, you're bigoted, or whatever else. You can't, therefore, have the discussion because you're put into a category. That's really a shame.
Richard Helppie
Well, we're descending into tribalism. And the thing with tribalism, my understanding is that tribalism only works if you think you're going to eradicate everybody in the other tribe. You better have the will and the means to do that or you better find a way to live on the same planet with them. We're being conditioned to be tribal. I could go off on a number of tangents on this, but this is one of them that's critical; we used to least be able to agree [that] we should protect kids. I am listening right now to the JD Vance book, "Hillbilly Elegy" and when he was eight or nine, he told his meemaw he thought he might be gay, because of the way it was described: his best friend in the world was this other guy who he wanted to be with all the time. [Chuckles.] And his grandmother said, well, first of all, you're too young and second of all, even if you are, [it's] not a problem.
Gerald Posner
Yeah, that's very interesting. As a matter of fact, Rich, Trisha and I are watching the Netflix film from 2020 that Ron Howard did with Glenn Close and others. I haven't read the book nor heard the audio yet, but it makes you want to read it because I also have been watching that so...I haven't seen it yet but that makes perfect sense of what is in that book. What is mentioned is one of the things I know you've talked about before and it's a big feature for me. That is that the idea here, we have this thing called puberty blockers, hormone blockers, the whole purpose of those - which are given off label, the FDA hasn't approved them for that purpose - is before a child starts puberty you go ahead and you give these very powerful drugs to them and they don't then go into their birth sex puberty. So if you're a boy, you don't get testosterone, if you're a girl, you don't get estrogen. And then if you decide, by the way, I really want to be another gender, how you do that at 11, 12, or 13 years old - I'm not sure how - then they start you on what they call cross-sex hormones, which are the hormones of the opposite sex, and then eventually there can be surgery down the road. The problem is that the original researchers who, in 1998, came up with puberty blockers - this theory which has been proven to be so dangerous - they were Dutch, even those Dutch researchers said in their early work, by the way, the one thing you should not do is have any social transitioning of children because if you allow them to use the pronouns they want, you allow them to dress in the dress of the gender they think they want to be, they're going to get into this medical pipeline much faster, and we're going to get what they called false positives. Well, false positive is, in a clinical test, when you get a result that looks as though it's positive but it's not real. Now you get a false positive with a child who's decided they want to be a different gender, and they have surgery or amputations of body parts to try to get there, that's not such an easy false positive to reverse. So the Dutch were counseling patients; let's see if this is a transient adolescent phase. Is this something that children go through where they love dinosaurs one week, and then they're crazy about drones, and then they're into Barbie and the next thing you know, they think they are an opposite gender? Well, you're allowed to pass. The problem, in part, is that gender progressive activists have said, we've got to push the pipeline along, because if we don't, these children might commit suicide, they're so stressed about who they are. Therefore we've raced the process along, we push them into the medical pipeline. I think we are leaving behind a litany of damaged children. Every prediction you make is subject to being wrong. But I really do believe, based upon the year of research that I've done now on this in depth, that in five years or maybe less, maybe longer, we will look back at this as one of the great medical scandals of modern American medicine like we look back on lobotomies. How was it possible that society thought it was a good idea to try to physically change the sex of children, which is impossible?
Richard Helppie
The parallels with lobotomies are stark; you're dealing with emotional or mental conditions or just regular old puberty. I was made aware this past week, of a young woman 30 years old now, who at 18 wanted to change her name. The students in the class were advised to use her male name. And she now says, I am so glad my parents drew the line at any kind of medication or surgeries. So she went through a period of very short hair and masculine affectations and today is a mother and understands that she is a female and has a great life. Still others are simply gay or lesbian. (Gerald Posner: That's right.) The notion that we're going to trans the gay away is insane. Again, the small percentage of people that are intersex who might have scrambled chromosomes or would have both male and female genitalia, the hermaphrodites, obviously, we have to be very compassionate with them and have a place for everyone. But taking a healthy boy or a healthy girl and putting them on this path is like Frankenstein. Gerald, you wrote about a law in California. If I'm not mistaken, July 18 Governor Newsom signed into law AB-1955. I'd like you to talk about that at some point today, but also fill me in a little bit more about what you're doing. This is your interview, time to let our listeners readers and viewers know what you've been discovering along the way.
Gerald Posner
Well, it's interesting, Richard, what you just said, which is there are small number of children born with what is now referred to as intersex, hermaphrodites. Doctors estimate it could be .001 - one thousandth of a percent - a very small number of children born with that. So in that sense, if you want to call it gender dysphoria, which is the term in the psychiatric manuals for it, but it's a physical condition. What's happening today, if you look at the numbers of people treated - and I've tracked this carefully - we're talking literally a few dozen children treated with "gender dysphoria" from let's say 2008 to 2014. Then in the last ten years the numbers increase; they skyrocket to thousands a year and then tens of thousands a year. It becomes a multi-billion dollar business for the pharmaceutical industry. So even if a true intersex, hermaphrodite is a condition which needs treatment and needs compassion, needs all of the attention that it deserves, we are greatly over diagnosing otherwise healthy children as having this and therefore they need surgical intervention. Now, it's different than making a choice if somebody is gay, they know that they feel they were gay and they announce that they're gay, they need no surgical modification to live their lifestyle, to be fully satisfied. They can be married, they can have surrogates, they can have children, the entire process follows through. But here, you need surgical modification if you think you can make this change. And by the way, what I've discovered is there is no such thing as a transition to another sex. Plastic surgeons can do the look so that on the outside you may appear...sometimes to do what I call, let's say, a boy becoming a girl...it's a woman face. Like we used to talk about black-face, it may look like a woman but it's not a woman. There's no cervix, there's no womb, there's no ability to have children, you have non-functioning sexual parts, you'll never be able to have any satisfaction sexually on either side. The thing that makes this to me so diabolical in many ways, is that the progressives who have - and I say progressive activists, not progressives just in terms of political thought - sort of pushed this ideology, call it gender affirming care. So the very idea that you are affirming something gives the average person the idea that the condition must exist, all you're doing...it's like diabetes affirming, you have diabetes, you're affirming the fact that you have diabetes, now you're going to treat it with insulin. So you're affirming that there is a disorder of some type that must be dealt with medically. That's the real sort of, what I call, fraud of this. Even in the psychiatric manual that defines the term gender dysphoria, which first came out a decade ago, originally it says that there should be two years of therapy before anybody gets medical treatment. Then they shortened that to six months, then they had age minimums of 16. Now they've done away with the age minimums, the six months is something of the past, kids go through in as quick as two weeks. So they're being shoved into the pipeline ever faster. I think that what is happening here is...I've talked to a number of psychologists, children's psychologists, and they all say, it's impossible for a child under the age of 18 - probably even from 18-20, 21, but at least 18 they're an adult - but impossible for a minor to give fully informed consent. Because as adolescents, they have no idea of what permanent consequences are, they can't judge risk. It's all about instant gratification. So if told...by the way, many of those who are transitioning over, and I say many [because] we don't have an exact count, but we know a disproportionate share of those who transition over often have an underlying condition with autism. Issues and symptoms that look and are typical of autism are sometimes misinterpreted by the therapist as something to do with gender; you feel out of place, you don't feel quite right, you have trouble connecting socially with other people. That's because you're in the wrong body. Once you put that into the mind of somebody who can fixate on it, the children embrace it. When you said before, the situation with the 30 year old who was fortunate that she had parents who said "no," many parents are afraid of saying no because they're given this false statistic that the risk of suicide is much higher if you say no to somebody who wants to be transgender. So if your son wants to become a girl, they will say to you, you're better off with a living daughter than a dead son. Now parents don't know enough to be able to answer that back. That's a very big cudgel used on them.
Richard Helppie
What, other threat of suicide, would make you capitulate to a demand?
Gerald Posner
Essentially there is none. But I will say this, I've looked into this because I think that this is an important statistic. It first came up by the Human Rights Commission, then the Trevor Report, which does a lot of good work. A lot of these organizations, LGB organizations that have also taken on the trans initiative and become advocates for it, do a lot of good work inside the lesbian, gay, bisexual community. They do real work on AIDS and on information and everything else. But now they've also become trans activists. And that's where the original statistic - as it was - came up, that there's a much higher risk of suicide. What really is, is if you look at LGB kids, they have a slightly higher risk of suicide than straight kids. That is true. There's a whole series of issues going on, psychological issues. So what happened is that activists said, well, LGB kids have high risk of suicide, trans kids must have the highest risk of suicide because that's yet another level of societal pressure. The stats just don't point it out. What they do point out - and this is what real advocates don't want to hear on the other side - is that if left alone - if you do not start hormones, puberty blockers, or surgery - that 90-95%, in a clinical study of children who identified as a different gender, if they were given the time to get through the phase, said, I don't want to change my gender. They went back, they stayed in their original sex. Most of the time, they turned out to be gay. They were lesbian, they were gay men and they were not, in fact, the opposite gender. Are there are instances in which parents have, let's say, a very effeminate gay young boy, 13 or 14 years old and they think to themselves well, it's really a girl? There are some instances in which parents encouraged this. There's a reality TV star, Jazz Jennings, who is transgender. The mother is sort of a stage mother who encouraged her process from day one and said, I knew that she was different gender at three or four years of age. That's impossible. There's no sexuality at that age. Anybody who thinks there's a sexuality at three and four years of age, let me tell you, you've got problems other than worrying about that. I always say, if somebody runs into me and they say...this happened once about six months ago, I actually had somebody say, I have a vegan dog. And I thought that tells me more about the owner of the dog than it does about the dog. That's the same case with parents who think that their child, because they played with a doll or with a tank or was a bit of a tomboy - as Trisha says she was when she grew up - might be a different gender at five or six; that's absolute madness.
Richard Helppie
It is absolute madness. We all know parents who stepped in, parented their children. It's harder in divorced parents, where one parent may be advocating, yeah, we're going to transition the child and the other parent is saying no. But the dangerous thing to me is the child being able to go to their teacher or their school administration and say, I was known as Amelia and now I want to be known as Armando, don't tell my parents.
Gerald Posner
You're right and you know what? Now you don't even have to say, as a child, don't tell my parents, because what you mentioned before - the law, Assembly Bill 1955 - passed in a real heated debate in the California Legislature. Originally the brainchild of the LGBTQ caucus in the California Legislature - which is the largest of any legislative body in the country, about 10-11% of all the assemblyman and senators, they identify as LGBT - they came up with this bill that says, okay, if a child says they want to be identified by different pronouns or they identify as a different gender, they want to wear something different, the teachers at the school - those who are the therapists, those who are the counselors, those who are sport coaches, everybody else - they cannot tell the parents, because they're barred from doing it. The philosophy behind this, which seems to me such an insane bill, is let's not have conversion therapy. Gay activists have often said, and correctly so because there would be churches and others and individuals who would think that they could convert a gay child back to being straight; it doesn't happen, in essence it's in the DNA. There are terrible stories about conversion. Now the advocates inside the California state legislature said, you know what, we think that parents will be doing the equivalent of conversion therapy. If a school tells those parents that the child is identified as a different gender, we're going to have parents who are trying to convert the child back; we don't want that. So this law has passed in its entirety. Now, the tough part of this became whether it would be signed into law by Gavin Newsom, who clearly has - no matter what else you think about Gavin Newsom; love him, hate him - ambitions for higher office. If not this year, in four years or whatever, he will be looking at the presidency. And I thought to myself, I wonder if he's going to make the decision on this bill with an eye to the future to see what the rest of the country thinks, play politics with it and maybe veto it; you couldn't say beforehand. Last year, he vetoed a bill that the legislature had also passed that said that you could consider the views of a parent on child transitioning in divorce proceedings, child custody. So in a child custody matter, if the child said, I want to be a different gender, and one parent says I'm against that, that would work against them in a child custody fight. Believe it or not, Newsom vetoed that. So I thought, oh, a rare moment of sanity, that was good. On the final day when he had to decide, he could have done nothing and then the bill becomes automatically law, sort of a coward's way of allowing it to become law. But he did more than that. He signed it, he embraced it and he took responsibility for it. I have to tell you that this is the most anti-parent - if you want to call it a war on parents - bill that now exists in the United States. It is the leading edge of putting the school in between the child and the parent. By the way, which is not on everything; your child gets sick, develops a cold, they've got a cough, or whatever else, they're going to call the parent before they dispense aspirin. But on the question of gender, they're going to keep that completely separate and - they think - protect the child. What they've really done is they've inserted the school system, the bureaucracy and the state, between the parent and the child. What I'm interested in is [that] this isn't a political issue that has come up on the radar in politics. There are a lot of us who are are outraged by Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, [he] put up that he was moving his SpaceX and Twitter operations to Texas, that that law was the last straw that broke the camel's back. But when you ask voters what they're voting for in the 2024 presidential elections, they say inflation. They're upset about what's happening at the border, or crime, whatever else, but you don't really see gender as an issue. Kamala Harris, former California Attorney General, friends with Gavin Newsom, a lot of people very progressive on gender issues. She's talked about the mistakes she thinks the Trump administration made in reversing the ban on transgender military service. I wonder what her position is on AB-1955? Supports that or not? I don't know if anyone will ask her that. In all the questions that national correspondents get a chance to ask candidates they ask the same question, one hundred times, about inflation. They don't ask the one question that sometimes will give us real insight into what leadership might be like.
Richard Helppie
Well, she looks like she's odds on favorite to be the nominee for the presidency now that President Biden has allegedly said he won't run, although that was the oddest thing that it was a letter on Twitter where people used to rail against mean tweets from former President Trump. [People] embracing this letter on plain letterhead that says I'm voluntarily giving up a run for the most powerful office in the world, and nobody's seen the guy for a few days.
Gerald Posner
It's very interesting you say that because Trisha, my wife, said to me last night, she said, gee I'd like some proof of life. She said that only half in jest but meaning, where is he? And you're right. It doesn't follow the traditional format of releasing something as a press statement, releasing from the White House or on the White House communication. It goes to X. Nobody in the Democratic Party really likes Elon Musk. They don't want to make his platform the news source. It was so odd that for a moment I thought it had been hacked. My first reaction when I saw it was somebody hacked the President's X site and we're about to find out in five minutes that that is the worst prank in the world. It turned out to be true.
Richard Helppie
And we don't know who's operating that. But on this bill in California, if the populace doesn't want this, and I can't imagine any parents saying, you know Charlie, if you want to become Charlotte and you're not comfortable with me, just work it out with the school and keep me in the dark - said no parent ever. California is effectively a one party state. There is no effective Republican Party in anywhere in the state, the assembly, and the governor's office. All the statewide offices are all held by Democrats. Are there not voices in the Democratic Party of California that can stand up for kids? And maybe as a broader question, what does this mean for the country as a whole going forward if we start sliding into this tribalism and one party rule?
Gerald Posner
I think that there's certainly a danger to one party rule, whether it happens to be Republican or Democratic. But in California, it's Democratic. The very idea that you were able to change, a few cycles ago, the election so that the top two vote getters get to run for office as opposed to necessarily a Republican against Democrat, means that you have just two variations, in many instances, of the same party. There was a real fight by the way; I was going to write a Substack about this bill inside the legislature. Somebody walked out; they were yelling at each other, it was the Republican minority and the Democratic majority. So things do get passed. Now, sometimes the governor, as we said before on the bill on whether transitioning for minors could be used as part of child custody veto, that sometimes the governor - in this case, Newsom - goes against the grain. He went against the parole board and kept Sirhan Sirhan in prison, even though they had said to release him. So there are those moments when the legislature on the whole...this would mean in California...I grew up in San Francisco, I went to college at Berkeley, I went to law school at Hastings, before moving back to New York to practice law in 1978. Many of my friends are still in Northern California, I follow California politics as carefully as a Floridian could follow it and the legislature is further left than the governor. It is really a progressive legislature, there's no doubt about it. We say all the time - when I say "we," as commentators - well, that seems to be something that would get under the skin of the public. This bill, for instance, would anger a lot of parents, but will those parents vote in November for different representation? I'm not sure. Will they have a choice that is remarkably different? I'm also not sure.
Richard Helppie
Well, they may be victims of the tribalism. We just saw it in Manhattan with a crazy verdict. As I looked at that, the jury, they're not going to go home and say, yeah, I voted to acquit Trump, okay, they just can't do it. They're going to be tossed out of the tent. But on the research that leads up to laws like AB-1955, and laws in Washington and Oregon that also follow the same philosophy, two big things, the organization called WPATH, most of what I've read about this is that there were circular citations going around and no real research behind it; I did go looking and I'm above average at reading medical data. And then also the Cass Review was a four year study out of the UK. The Cass Review basically said, hit the brakes on this, and the National Health Service over there has begun closing their gender clinics in the UK. So how do these two organizations - WPATH and the Cass Review - play into what we're seeing play out in California?
Gerald Posner
In California, the United States as a whole, we are out of sync with what is happening in the rest of the world in terms of pediatric gender care, and that is because the rest of the world is starting to put the brakes on. When I say the rest of the world, I don't mean just the UK, but it closed up their only gender clinic at Tavistock. In very progressive Nordic countries, in Sweden and in Norway and in Finland, they've stopped the distribution of puberty blockers to minors after having been early adopters of it. In France and in Germany and other countries, they started to roll back. Why? Not because of political push-back, but because of the science, and that's what we're not following here. All of what we've been talking about Richard, are politics. What I call advocates and progressive advocates are saying, this is what we think is right. What about the medicine and the science? I wrote a piece over a year ago in the Wall Street Journal called "The Truth About Puberty Blockers." It highlighted the 10,000 adverse event reports that the FDA had about children who had been given the equivalent of Lupron, one of the puberty blockers, when they'd had height issues years ago. So we know the devastating effects these have and yet for some reason they continue to be dispensed without FDA approval. WPATH, which you mentioned before - the World Professional Association for Transgender Health - is an umbrella organization sort of like the AARP or AAA. It's an umbrella that brings in everybody so you can join, I can join, you don't have to be a doctor. But a lot of doctors are members, a lot of advocates are members, clinicians, and they set the policies, the standards of care, that are followed by many of the hospitals and other organizations that do transgender care for minors. They are advocates more than they are researchers and clinicians. One of their most prominent members is Admiral Rachel Levine, the first transgender four star admiral ever, who is the Undersecretary of Health. As a member of the organization, [Levine] has said that they do great work. We now know from emails [which] have been released that she was encouraging them to go ahead and remove the minimum age restrictions on when children could start to have treatment. I got a call about six or seven months ago from Michael Shellenberger, who is the California journalist who has done some great work. He has an organization now called Public. He said to me, I've had some whistleblowers come forward and they have released to me files from inside WPATH that show the extent to which that organization does not believe that children can give consent and they know the side effects are terrible, and they're ignoring it; I'm going to do a big piece on it, which he did, called "The WPATH Files." [He said] if you want I'll share the information with you and you can write about it and I said, sure, and I did. I wrote a long piece in The New York Post at the time. This is a disgrace WPATH should have been finished when Shellenberger broke the story on them. It proved that they are not really doctors looking out for the best interest of their patients as much as they are advocates looking to advance an ideology and ignore the evidence completely. Then you mentioned the Cass Report. Cass Report is by a pediatrician, a well respected pediatrician in the UK, who was given the task by the former government to go ahead and investigate, rely on and look at different studies that were peer reviewed, everything that's been published, like a meta analysis, find out what the status is when it comes to puberty blockers. Are they safe? Are they not? Should they be dispensed to minors? Her report, 377 pages, is a devastating indictment of the failure of doctors and other organizations around the world to do their homework. It is so strong that even the new incoming government in the UK, a labour government, sort of like the Democratic equivalent versus the Republicans here. They have been very, very liberal on many gender issues, they've announced that they will continue to block the distribution of puberty blockers to minors based on her report. That's how strong it is. But here in the United States WPATH and what I call activists, have dismissed the report and said, oh, it's just written by a single pediatrician. That means they haven't read it.
Richard Helppie
I read it and it's a deep research piece. They actually cite data and their conclusions are really very, very solid that this stuff doesn't work. And to the point you made earlier, that you can't diagnose that a person is transgender, there's not a blood test like diabetes that you were talking about. You can look at glucose levels and figure out whether a person is diabetic or not. People talk about well, Alzheimer's, you can't do a definitive diagnosis short of an autopsy. But if you take even the transgender world into that, well, would an autopsy reveal that the person was transgender? Actually, it confirms the opposite. (Gerald Posner: That's exactly right.) Post mortem exam would be nope, that's still a boy.
Gerald Posner
Absolutely fantastic. The bones, the body, the biology will always tell you, although biology is now a bad word and isn't used very often. One of the things that's fascinating is what you just said a moment ago; there's not a test, not a diagnostic test. But there are not diagnostic tests for a lot of the illnesses that we know are mental illnesses that really afflict people, from schizophrenia to bipolar to clinical depression. But there's a big difference. I wrote a piece about this called "Who Put the Kids in Charge?" What I mean by that is, if you walk into a psychiatrist's office and you say, by the way, I'm bipolar or I am clinically depressed, the psychiatrist does not accept your word of what your situation is, put it into the medical record, and then dispense drugs to you based upon that. They will start to analyze, they will sit down with you, they'll have talk therapy, they'll figure out whether you're right in your judgment. But when a child appears before a therapist, or says, by the way, I'm not John, I'm Joanne, the therapist - by the rules of WPATH and other progressive organizations - is barred from challenging that. They can't...they have to accept it. So it's like saying, oh, you're right; they have to affirm it because they're afraid that by doing otherwise, doing the opposite and challenging the child, it would be the equivalent of conversion therapy. So we're in this mad world where it's the only area - in terms of psychologists and psychiatry - in which affirming is the key way to approach it. And let me tell you, it gets even worse. I wrote a piece again in The New York Post about the American Psychiatric Association. Now, we think of psychiatrists as the first line of defense to stopping children from getting medical affirming care. They've just adopted, last year, a medical textbook for the first time on gender, which is one of the most aggressive, affirmative, pro, fast trans books I've ever seen, written by a young psychiatric resident who himself is transgender. It's remarkable to me that the medical associations that we put faith in - the American Pediatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association - instead of being the guardians of children, they have become instead cheerleaders for a non-science based, non-medical based ideology that is leaving thousands of victims in it's wake.
Richard Helppie
I read parts of that also, and it reads like a science fiction with spectacular extrapolations. Clearly no parent or anyone that ever cared for a child would endorse this. Gerald, your point about mental and emotional illnesses can be diagnosed and they can be managed and they can be observed, we come back to lobotomies. Somebody thought, hey, we can surgically change someone's emotional or mental condition. We can't. A responsible plastic surgeon for someone that wants a cosmetic change, the first question is, what do you think will be different after the surgery? We've seen [some] women from time to time that want to get so much plastic surgery they look like the Barbie doll, or there was a fellow some years back that wanted to look like Michael Jackson and he apparently found doctors to do that. But if I went into a surgeon's office today and said, I identify as a one armed guy and want you to take this arm off, they would immediately begin treating me for a mental health issue. But if I come in and say I want to change my genitalia, they'd be like, right this way, we're going to affirm you. That shows you how insane this is.
Gerald Posner
It depends on...it's hard...on Tuesday I'm mad at the pharmaceutical companies for doing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Wednesday, I'm mad at the plastic surgeons for doing all the surgery. Thursday, mad at the government policy makers. I want to say it depends on the day, but the plastic surgeons, on those days when I'm particularly mad at plastics as a field, how those doctors who have embraced it...I've looked at their study. It's just...you wonder how they can keep their medical licenses, in some cases, going forward. There's a view now among a few of them who have done hundreds of surgeries, they specialize in what's called nullification. Now that's unusual because we think if a child says I want to be the opposite gender they do the cosmetic surgeries to try to do that type of surgery. But nullification is in which a child says, I'm non-binary, I don't identify as male or female. The activists - and they are surgeons and therapists - say those children should not be forced into the binary false world of men and women that we have created over several millennia on this planet. So if you don't believe you're either male or female, nullification are surgeries that remove the sexual organs so that you can, in some cases try to [inaudible] but in most cases it removes them to the extent that girls have their breasts off, boys have their penises taken off, and they want to look like a department store mannequin. Have you ever seen a mannequin without the clothes on before it's dressed? It is this sort of neutral space alien type body. Now that, to me, is child abuse. That, to me, is somebody that you think their medical license should be questioned. I'm not talking one or two cases, not like the kid who wanted to look like Michael Jackson or the woman wanted to look like Barbie. We're talking about hundreds of surgeries in the last couple of years. WPATH - The World Professional Association for Transgender Health - has an entire section in which they've endorsed, in their last Standards of Care, nullification surgeries and they talk about it in their own files.
Richard Helppie
The obvious thing to me, and I would imagine most thinking people, if you think the world is both binary and non-binary people, that isn't in itself binary - and I mean it is. Relative to the plastic surgeons, I had a guest on my show, her name is Beth Bourne, and she did some investigative journalism presenting herself to Kaiser in Northern California saying that she thought she wanted to become more masculine and perhaps transition. What she discovered was that the plastic surgeons love the breast removal procedure, because they don't have to do much planning. If they're dealing with someone that suffered from breast cancer, they have to get the right tissue out and then do the rebuilding and it's a much more difficult surgery, versus oh, I've got 40 minutes on my calendar, there's an open OR, we can remove those breasts. Because it's a very imprecise and high revenue way to practice their craft.
Gerald Posner
That's right. But Richard, what they've done is they've carved out specialties so now, what I call the most in demand plastic surgeons who do the double mastectomy for young girls, they also do it though, in a way different than it would be done for a woman who had breast cancer in that they build up some of the tissue so that it looks more like a male pectoral muscle. So not only is it taken off, but it could look a little bit more like a male muscle. In addition, it is hard to imagine, the more I get into the details of it, there are times I'm still slack jawed...there's a contagion here. Kids have caught a contagion, there's no doubt about this, it's part of the increase. In places like Reddit and Instagram and on TikTok and other sites, hidden sites, these trans pro sites, the girls actually talk about where they want the scars. Do you want the scars from taking your breasts off here? Do you want them here? Look, I have three scars along here. It's a style thing. Now we're seeing the first wave, I call it a wave of de-transitioners, people who did have surgery, medical procedures to go to what they thought was the opposite gender and then said, oh my god, this isn't what I want. And now they're trying to come back, which is almost impossible to do. If you've had amputations you're certainly not going to. Even if you haven't had the actual plastic surgeries, there are some things that will never change. So for girls who take testosterone, for instance, they develop some facial hair and a deeper voice. When they stop taking testosterone - they decide that it's a mistake - the facial hair will go away but the deep voice never changes, you can't bring that back. So there are...we talked before for a moment, we mentioned a couple of times lobotomies, and I think there are people here that will say, well, that was such a crazy idea but how could...? People forget that the doctor who invented lobotomies got a Nobel Prize in Medicine. There was a point at which that was thought of as an advance, believe it or not. Now we look back on it, Monday morning, and we see how terrible it was. But we forget sometimes that the medical community can make mistakes, they embrace things that are wrong and they're doing it now.
Richard Helppie
Another parallel, that lobotomies were performed on vulnerable people, often without their consent and now we're in the situation where these hideous medications and surgeries are being performed on innocent people without their consent, because they can't give informed consent.
Gerald Posner
In the states, when you talk about one party control and progressives, look at it in Oregon, perfect example. Oregon changed its law about a year ago so that 16 year old girls don't need a parent to come in and sign the form if they want to get a double mastectomy. (Richard Helppie: Oh, geez.) They need the form signed by the therapist that was talking to them, that will be sufficient. But the state of Oregon also has a law that says if you want to use a suntanning bed, you need to be 18, you need to have your parent's written consent, and the written consent of a doctor. So the state protects children more diligently from the possibility of developing cancer from UVA rays on a suntan bed than it does for taking their breasts off and having surgery. That's madness to me.
Richard Helppie
It is crazy and I'm still speechless about where are the voices protesting this? Theoretically, in a representative form of government, more than 50% of the people would say this is madness, stop it, and that we would have institutions protecting the vulnerable from this. Neither the government, physicians organizations, so-called research organizations, ethical pharmaceutical companies - none of them are between children and a very horrible future.
Gerald Posner
You're so right. I mean, the medical associations have abandoned common sense for now and they need to come around. There's a problem also, we talked before about how England closed up its one youth gender clinic, and then how they have the Cass Report and they've adopted policy, but they have national health. Doctors work for the government. They can do that, they can have a policy directive and it takes place. Here, if you have a federal policy, or it's usually state by state, so California might be very progressive and Florida, less so. So it depends on what happens. In addition, the individuals talking out against it who are politicians are often Republican governors in red states. So it's DeSantis, it's in other red states and that immediately provokes the opposite reaction from progressives and Democrats who say, wow, that must be against children so we can't go with that. What we don't have here is we don't have a public figure. We don't have a Gloria Steinem, or Jane Fonda, or some younger woman who's leading the movement who can say, you know what, I think young girls are being damaged by this. JK Rowling, in London, the children's author of Harry Potter, has staked out a position arguing against not only men in women's spaces and trying to keep the sanctity of women's spaces, but against what she calls this mutilation of children taking place, at great risk to her, she doesn't need to do it. She's a very successful person, she could go off and retire and just spend her time in Spain and write more children's books. But she's become a public voice on this and she's rallied a lot of women, so much so that in the recent campaign for prime minister, questions would be asked of the candidates based upon what she was putting up on Twitter. That's fairly remarkable. We have no one like that here. We don't have an advocate who is not a politician. I don't know how JK Rowling votes. I don't know if she voted for Labour conservatives, because she doesn't tell you that. But she's strong on the issue. It would be great if we had an advocate who had a public profile like her. We need a JK Rowling type in America to argue this issue where you don't know her background politics. I actually think she's been a progressive for years, but you're willing to make some room for common sense with her.
Richard Helppie
Well, she's not only been subjected to real vile language, but also suggested that she's prosecuted under the new law in Scotland, that makes it a crime to speak out against transgender ideology. She's basically saying, come on and arrest me and the Scottish authorities, so far, haven't taken that step. But I concur. Where is the - pick a random name - Jennifer Aniston, any of them...Taylor Swift could say celebrate being a woman, girls, and this could start to put the brakes on this.
Gerald Posner
And yet we don't see it. I think part of the reason is...it's not fear, it's not because they're afraid of the...but they are afraid of the push-back, because they think it doesn't make them look progressive.
Richard Helppie
Exactly right. Well, their friends are going to ostracize them. And even people..center left people like Bill Maher has said, how come at a dinner party in Los Angeles three women are talking about their transgender child. He said, if this was actually based in biology, wouldn't there be the same number of people in Akron, Ohio? Of course, like most people on the left that start to speak with some kind of reason, all of a sudden, hey, he's not one of us anymore.
Gerald Posner
I've said that to a very progressive friend of mine recently, who will remain unnamed, who has accepted for the most part - not withstanding being smarter than that - much of the gender activism. I said, why is it on the coasts? In New York City, in Manhattan, in California, we have a higher incidence of transgender children than we do in the middle of the country. And his answer to that was because parents on the coasts are more informed, more willing to understand the needs of their children and more willing to embrace it. I thought, boy is that a bit of delusional denial, but there's always a way to spin it.
Richard Helppie
No, it fits with that whole perception that we're smarter than you (Gerald Posner: Yeah, that's right.) and that what your experiences are, are not correct. We could probably take this in a lot of different tangents right from that point. But this “othering” of folks not like you, demeaning them and saying, well, they're not important, that's what opens the door to this. Our polarization is really at the foundation which is why I'm trying to do this show. It's fiercely nonpartisan; can we stay on the issues? Although I do political commentary and I'm very proud of the fact that I get yelled at by the Left and the Right on the same episode or the same column I write.
Gerald Posner
That's when you know you're doing a good job. As a matter of fact, you'll get this, Rich, completely. I used to be able to go ahead - if I had a book out on finances in the Vatican or in the pharmaceutical industry, whatever - I would go on CNN and MSNBC and Fox, I would be able to talk about the book on three different channels. Today, that very seldom happens. Because if you go on MSNBC right away, the Fox people say, oh, it must be a left wing book. And if you go on Fox right away, the MSNBC and CNN producers say it must be a right wing book. That never...these are issues that are not political, they may have political ramifications and politicians may make the decisions on them eventually, but we're talking something about gender ideology, minors, whether there should be drugs and surgeries that we think children can give consent to. I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat, this is a parent's issue. It's a universal issue. We don't have children, Trisha and me; we have two godchildren. We don't have children but we're incensed about this. I can only imagine how incensed we would be if we actually had children.
Richard Helppie
It's a scary time to be a parent and a grandparent. This has been a fascinating conversation. As we come to our close today, are there any final thoughts or anything we didn't discuss today that you'd like to convey to the listeners and the readers and the viewers of The Common Bridge?
Gerald Posner
So you know, do I see the glass half full or half empty? I see it half full in terms of some sanity coming back to this issue in this sense: we need the big legacy newspapers. People say I don't read the New York Times anymore, The Washington Post, but they still carry tremendous sway. Recently there was a great opinion piece in The New York Times about the fact that the medical communities in America have not followed the science when it comes to gender care for minors. That piece may not have broken new reporting ground but for The Times, it was revolutionary. It goes to show that I think there's a little bit of a sea change taking place among the opinion makers in the media. And when eventually the big newspapers, then networks like ABC and CBS, no longer feel compelled to parrot the most progressive advocacy on this, then maybe the politicians start to slow up and give some strength to parents and ordinary citizens to stand up for the rights of their children.
Richard Helppie
I think truer words were never spoken. Those parents come from all points on the political spectrum. We're here with our very special guest today, Gerald Posner, renowned investigative reporter and renowned author, media personality, one of the best researchers and deepest thinkers that we're blessed to have in America today. This is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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