1: The Elephant In The Pickle Jar

Welcome to the inaugural edition of A Special Place in Hell, a podcast in which an aging Gen X author and a self-hating millennial activist will come together once a week for a lively discussion. thoroughly and conclusively solving our culture war problems with their combined wit, wisdom, and most importantly, lived experiences. I'm Megan Daum. The self-hating millennial is Sarah Hader. Sarah. Hi.

So why are you self-hating? Just the top reason. I feel like we don't need to explain to this audience why I need to be a self-hating movie. They have no idea who we are. They're just like, what? Who? Okay. Self, I mean, you're just self-hating because you're a millennial. Right. Okay. Okay. I'm self-hating because I hate my last name and I don't know how to pronounce it. I think I just said Megan Daum.

And it's caused endless confusion because this is worthy of its own episode. But for years, I said Dom. And there's a long, boring backstory to that. um, when I started doing my podcast, the unspeakable a few years ago, I started saying down, uh, and it just made everything. What is it? Okay. Well, it's, it's, I don't, it really is neither. So just to be super fast.

When I was growing up, it was down. And I was constantly correcting people because they would say Dom, like they would default to Dom. And my parents. um were like very they really wanted to distance themselves from their own families and like they they had met like a german professor when they were first married and i guess the german professor was like it's not dom it's dome and so they started saying that And so we grew up saying that. And then at a certain point.

I realized that my cousins and all these relatives that my mother especially had like thought she was too good for, they all said Dom. So I just kind of made a decision. I was like in my, you know. early 30s at that point to just not only stop correcting people but to start saying dom so so i said i like dom well okay but but so everybody who had known me up until i was like 29 said down and then i started saying dom and then when i started started the podcast

You know, my father had died like, you know, a year or so before. And I started the podcast and I like would open my mouth to say my name. And Dom just I felt so guilty, like it couldn't come out. Oh, it doesn't. You know, neither. I was sort of saying down. Neither of my names are like how technically they're supposed to be pronounced because they're both.

in you know in urdu which is a different language so the pronounce pronunciations of of both sarah and hater are different oh um and i don't i mean i don't care i i think i tried to correct people When I first came to America and I was a kid and I tried to do that for a couple of weeks and then quickly realized it was never going to work. So what is it supposed to be? Am I putting you on the spot? It's Sarah Heder.

that's what it is so it's like a totally it's a different way of saying you've got to roll the r with in the in the sarah um it's it's hispanics hispanics tend to they they pronounce it right the the sarah part usually um so you were like seven years old and you were trying to make this correction i i did and then it was just so no one was getting it and all these other kids were like what

what are you talking about? Your name is Sarah. I was like, okay. Okay. But that's, you know, it's fine. I'm envious because you have like a straightforward name. You have easily pronounceable name privilege, which is a privilege category that I've heard.

people talk about actually believe it or not having a simple last name yeah having a simple last name is a privilege category so you that puts you a step ahead of me um so that that solves it so um all right well so we've started this podcast uh because we part partly because we had a great conversation a few weeks ago on on my podcast and

I have been wanting to do something with a partner, something just a lot more fun. Not that my podcast isn't a barrel of laughs. So we're just going to talk about stuff in the news and especially stuff pertaining to gender.

not always but frequently um so i don't know do you want to just like tell people who you are you have a lot more twitter followers than i do so i think more people know who you are anyway like where do you come from what's your deal Well, I come from... kind of a strange background which you know i wouldn't want to get into too much i presume many of the people listening to this will know who i am but um i

Got involved in, I guess, the public space when I started a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of ex-Muslims. That's people who've left the religion of Islam. And then I. I really started speaking out when I noticed that it was actually quite unpopular to be an ex-Muslim and the kinds of things that I was talking about.

which is to say the criticism of the religion and problems within the community. I found that people didn't really want to listen to it, that it was one of those things that became... you know, part and parcel of what I now call woke politics. And so I, you know, I started thinking, okay, there's something wrong. Something's wrong with our discourse. Something's happening and it doesn't really make a lot of sense. um and i think a lot of people

Megan, you included, like we were all just sort of swept up in this wave of just coming up together and noticing something's wrong. Something's off. Is it just me? But it's like, is it just, they should have called it like hashtag, is it just me? Yeah. Yeah. Does anyone else smell this?

Yeah, so I started then sort of discussing other issues that I've had, including a lot to do with gender, a lot to do with feminism. And, you know, what I hope that... we'll be able to discuss in this podcast is you know a kind of discussion about women's issues and just gender roles in general and sex in general that I, you know, from a perspective that I don't think is often present in mainstream discourse, at least. And I think Megan and I, we were talking.

is this is this the first time we when we started like dming was was when i we were we were talking about why isn't there a female jordan peterson oh yeah um maybe so maybe so so i think yeah Yeah, yeah. So I think that's when we connected. And I've still been thinking about that, you know, like where... You know, why isn't there this other option for for women outside of like the mainstream, you know, yes, queen girl boss. Right. Kind of feminine. And also not like a Republican.

right right like also phyllis schlafly 3.0 yeah i mean i think there are some People like Christina Hoff Summers talks about that stuff a lot. And Camille Paglia, actually. Some of my favorite YouTube videos are Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers hashing a lot of this stuff out. But yeah, I do think that there's, especially when it comes to like... questions of biological imperative and, you know, what is nature versus what is, you know, societal?

societal norms um a lot of women don't like to talk about that stuff or i feel they don't talk about it in the right way let's just put it that way so we're going to talk about this in exactly exactly the right way we're not going to have one misstep ever Yeah. And we should say that the name of our show, A Special Place in Hell, it comes from a line that is usually attributed to Madeleine Albright.

uh she said there's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women and um it's been you know apparently there are like t-shirts and mugs this is a meme there's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women is a meme So we're just calling our show a special place in hell because we don't help other women. And the world is hell and this is a special place. It works on many levels. It's multidimensional. Yeah.

Okay. So, and yeah, people know who I am or maybe they don't. They probably don't. We should also say that we have a big generational divide and that's part of the magic. of of uh this show uh possibly you are 30 30 yes i'm 30. i am not 30. Definitely not 30. I am I am more than two decades older than 30. So I actually could be your mother. Oh, wow. We're from a certain, you know, that bums me out. Yeah, I didn't.

Sorry. It was a buzzkill. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, so we've got a big age difference, but you are, you're kind of a traitor to your generational cohort. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah. So we're going to talk about lots of stuff. We're going to talk about.

the matt walsh documentary about uh it's called what is a woman we're recording this on june 18th and so people have been talking about that uh over the last few weeks and we're going to talk about this huge piece of the new york times magazine by emily bazelon about youth gender transition that it's going to be in tomorrow's print edition of the new york times but first you uh sent me

An incredible piece, also very long. We've done a lot of reading this week, I've got to say. Many, many words. From The Intercept, just about how terrible the nonprofit world is. And that's something you already knew. Maybe you want to talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So this was just, you know, for me, a very cathartic experience reading through this piece. So Ryan Grimm, just to give people. little bit of a background. He's, you know,

The Intercept's D.C. bureau chief. I don't I don't even know what that means exactly. But he he wrote this very, very long piece. He interviewed many, many different executive directors of progressive advocacy. organizations. The piece is called Elephant in the Zoom, which is, you know, I love puns. but specifically focuses on how meltdowns have brought progressive advocacy groups to a standstill. And going through it, there was just...

All these personal accounts from executive directors or various senior leaders and nonprofit organizations that were talking about how. There's just so much internal strife that's going on that they're spending an inordinate amount of time on, you know, what is essentially... just bs right um there was one uh executive director who said that he was spending or she was spending i forget if it was a man or a woman don't gender it was a man they they said that they were spending 90 to 90

25% of their time on internal strife. Whereas before it would have been 25 to 30% tops. I mean, even that, even that's. Oh, I was the good old days when we were only spending 25 to 30% of our time on internal strife. Now by internal strife, you mean.

people like accusing others of microaggressions on zoom what are we talking about i mean people are accusing others of basically being racist in various ways and sexist and all you know i mean it's it's that's why you go to work at a non-profit organization like in my time you went to work for one of these organizations because you wanted to wear j jill clothes

That was the thing. I don't even know what that is. This is why. J. Jill clothes are like the clothes that women who work for nonprofit organizations wore in the 80s and beyond. You know, like the flowy, you know, like a lot of. earth tones and natural sort of textures and a lot of scarves and dangling earrings kind of eileen fisher um like that that direction and if you wanted to dress like that you would go work for a non-profit organization

You know, one thing that struck me about this piece, it's not just political groups. Like there was a ton of drama going on in the Sierra Club, like organizations that I wouldn't have thought had any kind of political leading necessarily. So it doesn't matter. Do you think it's because of. the personality profiles of somebody who would go into this line of work. I mean, not only do you have to care and not, you know, need to make so much money necessarily. Is there like a certain.

sort of psychological profile like yeah it causes people to then act like this so i mean i'm just Here, I'm really, really guessing, but it's, of course, something I see in my day-to-day work. The kind of person that goes into the nonprofit space, of course, they care, right? They're caring people. And so that could mean...

I do care. And that could mean I want to be seen as caring, which are two different things, of course. And the problem is, is that there are truly many people who do care and they are very... They're easily confused by extreme activists that might come in and say, you are doing me so much harm.

You are destroying me in some deep way. You're harming me and I'm marginalized and you're hurting marginalized people. You're destroying the cause for... i mean all this stuff i can't even i i'm not even good they just like lapse into the jargon right but they And once so if you're if you're a nice, you know, caring, liberal type and someone throws all this at you, all these accusations at you, you think, oh, no, I don't want to be this person. I don't want to hurt marginalized people.

I want to be part of the solution and I want to be part of the healing or whatever. So what happens is a lot of these nice, caring people capitulate. to extremists so they're not going to stay their default position is not going to be to stand up to the mob the way we might imagine a business leader would although they don't either these days never yeah they they never uh i mean it's so it's so rare

see a nonprofit leader that can stand up to claims of to the kind of like, honestly, it's emotional abuse, right? And manipulation to say that if, you know, to say that if you don't support me, you are and you know, whatever. phobe racist sexist whatever i mean these are these are the kind of peoples who really are deeply affected and wounded if you if you call them these things because they they often dedicate their entire lives to these like

to the pursuit of, you know, justice or something, something good and pure. Right. So it's, it's just, it's just a powerfully effective tool, you know, to use this kind of language. And it works. And unfortunately, these organizations that have a lot of works in nonprofits, there's so much work. There's always too much work. There's always too much work and not enough money and not enough time. And then on top of that, you have endless.

drama uh i mean you know it got me thinking when i was reading this when i'm you know i i'm uh have led um organizations to lead an organization um when i'm thinking about this drama that when it comes into my lap I'm thinking

all these people that are stealing from the cause, you know, whether, whether that's how they would phrase it or not, that's how I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking this is money that could have gone to advancing something important. And instead I, you know, cause staff time is money. Right. Staff time is money on energy and all of that is important. And it is being bled out by this, this, you know, these bullshit, you know, drama episodes.

um and and beyond the fact that it's going to that's money that's being taken away from a cause it's also donors don't give for this right the donors are giving their money yeah they don't like um and you know sometimes it's just non-profits are funded through like these big

you know, pocketed people and that happens a lot, but there's also often like a huge base of smaller dollar donors, you know, and they're giving a hundred dollars a year. That's the best they can do, but it means a lot to them to support, you know, the environment or whatever. Right. And. It is truly a betrayal of the trust that donors place in you when they give you their hard-earned cash.

Yeah. I mean, and it's interesting, too, because, I mean, we hear a lot about what's happened with the ACLU, for instance, or like Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood. But again, I was just amazed that this is just happening across the board.

Sierra Club meltdown that was over their their founder John Muir was had an association with eugenicists which like a lot of people did at that time like it's sort of this you know it's the outrage archaeology kind of maneuver so you could you know you add any basically any organization that was founded i don't know before uh yesterday

is going to have some kind of problematic element to it just by virtue of, you know, yesterday is inherently problematic anyway. So, like, there's no winning. I mean, it is a snake eating its own tail. And, I mean, do you think that the people, you know, the staff members or the people who are waging these complaints, is it because they're not getting paid very much that they feel entitled to?

make these complaints yeah i don't know i don't know if money has anything to do with it you know i don't i don't think that's what they're getting out of it um because volunteers will do this too um oh wow you know So it's more of the generational thing. It's more of this is how they come to work. This is the mindset that they bring to work.

I think it might be a kind of like a, you know, the personalist political kind of thing where, where justice begins, you know, at home, you know, at work, you know, at my desk.

And I think that they don't understand the realities of how a business works and how an organization works. And some of that might just be due to youth. Or how the world works. I mean, really, just how human nature works or any kind of... organizational or hierarchical structure well i mean it's like what do you think changed because You know, when I was, I worked at a couple of nonprofits when I was, you know, younger. And it would not have occurred to anybody that they should.

stand up to senior management like what do you think changed it's it's interesting that you even phrase it that way because i think that now the default is to to look at senior management as if they, they, they owe you something or they're, they're somehow just, just by virtue of being senior management are guilty of something. Are they parental? Like they owe you something like, like as if they're parental.

general suspicion of of hierarchies you know and even if they're they're totally earned and legitimate and and necessary necessary for the functioning of an organization i think there's just a general there's just a general suspicion of of power right and and senior officials but they're they're in power they're powerful people and they're invoking their power and

And I think they can't help but look at everything through this lens. And it creates a circumstance where you're a senior official in one of these organizations. You actually feel... more vulnerable than a junior staff member might which is crazy and of course it leads to a dynamic where you you don't get any work done um you're you know you're you're In the best case scenario, you're just on edge a little bit all the time. But it's definitely a tail wagging the dog kind of a situation. Wow.

Yeah, I mean, Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot. Like, you know, hierarchies are natural. There's always a natural hierarchy in any kind of ecosystem. in the animal kingdom, just in civilizations of all kinds. But is it because that a lot of these kids... young people have been like steeped in critical theory and intersectional framework in college so power automatically just yeah could know something that must be fought

Yeah, I think so. I think there's just a general suspicion of of of power and and and always an assumption that it is illegitimate in one way or another, you know, so even and then even if you try in and try, you know, try and. you make it so that they can't come at you with those kinds of claims by getting a woman who is also, you know, of color, who is also, you know, gay or whatever. And you try to make it so that maybe they can't attack you in those ways.

always find a way. You know, there's always a way to say that this person is actually privileged. But ultimately, by virtue of being a senior official, they are privileged. And you're right that hierarchies are very important. Hierarchies are very important to get work done. That's it. And at the end of the day, if you're committed to a cause, you should... should be comfortable or at least get comfortable with the idea of a healthy hierarchy. And I think it's...

To some degree, this is sort of a poison that's throughout all progressive organizations. It's just this this, you know, reflexive, you know. suspicion of anything resembling a hierarchy and then you have these you know circle of friends holding their hands together and who don't get anything done

Yeah. And so, and this, yeah, I mean, obviously this happens in all kinds of workplaces. We just saw it happen in the Washington post last week. It's, it's all over the place, but there's a particular flavor to the, the non-profit world.

It was interesting that that happened so close to the publication of this article, because I think you see extreme versions of what is about to... to befall the entire culture, you know, in the nonprofit space, in the advocacy space, because the advocacy space, they are the people who are, you know, pushing our culture in one direction or the other.

or the other, especially all these nonprofits that are, that don't, you know, they don't ladle out soup to, to the homeless. They're, they're pushing a social cause there, you know, their, their entire reason for, for, for, um, you know, mission and vision is is to educate people on one issue or another what they're doing is they are

putting out videos um they're acting as a pressure group um they are uh you know putting out publication all sorts of things to try and push a specific view of how society should be um of how we should feel about a specific issue and So if we see this kind of insanity take over the nonprofit space to this degree, we are definitely going to see downstream effects. throughout the progressive space or any space that's strongly inhabited by progressives.

media you know companies like the washington post so do you feel so so this made you at least feel less crazy this piece it made me feel i mean crazy but less crazy but also just mad you know um that that it's gotten to be because by the time you know something is published like this in the intercept and you have so many executive directors saying the same thing that means it's terrible

Like, right. What's out there is terrible. And it is maybe even worse than what I thought myself, because I am obviously I'm in. or, you know, was in like sort of this progressive aligned space as, you know, an atheist organization. But because we were...

Because of the ex-Muslim nature of it, we were always sort of on sort of a strange middle ground when it came to the woke politics. So I think we were... slightly better off um or maybe even maybe even like highly better i don't i don't know but but it's also it's also the fact that I've always been around. I've always been a leader in this organization. I've been very visible and very vocal about how I feel about things. And I think that that has...

been an indirect filter to, you know, so just these sort of woke types, I think, didn't approach us in the same way. Right. And it helps that you are a woman and a woman of color, right? If you lay it down. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think it does. But, you know, I don't know because they they. They start to see you as a traitor, which is worse than, you know, like it's almost worse than being, you know, a white man is being somebody who technically meets all the right.

identity requirements but still refuses to say what you think that they must say right all right yeah exactly yeah it's like you can only be canceled by your own side yeah they there's nothing they punish worse than a

than a heretic somebody somebody who they thought was with them well okay well speaking of that dynamic um should we move on to um our uh our movie our movie of the week um oh yeah what is a woman matt walsh from the daily wire can you explain to me who he is exactly uh matt walsh i mean so i I don't really understand Matt Walsh. He's he's a lot of things, isn't he? Because he's been he's he covered some of these stunts and stuff that he's been.

um pulling lately um around the gender issue uh but you can say he's just a pundit uh conservative okay um but so is he does he write things Or does he? Does he? No, I think he's just a political commentator. He has, I think, a podcast or a show or something. Yeah, he has a podcast. That's right. And he might have written books in the past. Okay.

So he has put together a very polished, very entertaining documentary film about... um the gender ideology wars and at the center of it he's just it's a very simple premise he's going around and asking people to define what a woman is And he talks to everybody from sort of academic gender studies types to clinicians who are involved in youth gender transition to everyday people on the street.

And it's very funny. How did you, what was your kind of, what did you think of this movie? Did you like it? Did you like it? I liked it. Yeah, I liked it. I mean, it was very well produced. And I don't know what I expected going in. I don't know. I'm just so, you know, because. What I know about conservatives and production value, it's like from their websites, they're so often so bad. Oh, that's so mean. Really? Well, because none of the great cinematographers will work for them.

um yeah well i you know i mean none of the big agencies will represent them yeah it's hard yeah well so so i i thought um that it was it was very well produced um and you know well edited and Overall, a fairly, I mean, superficial, but more or less complete picture of the debate with the... conspicuous absence of feminists who have been pushing back against gender ideology. I think that for the average person that doesn't know anything about this issue...

It was a fairly good encapsulation of this perspective, of the, I guess, gender critical perspective. And, you know, covering all the... the basics, I guess, fairly well. And I don't, you know, I wonder if he really was... you know, nut picking there with the choice of, of people, you know, people he was, he was interviewing. I mean, did you think, you know, a lot of them seemed like that they were.

intelligent people. I'm sure. I'm sure they have multiple degrees. There was that professor. What did you think of him? That guy was amazing. I felt like I was watching a Christopher Guest movie at that point. um yeah the the the um what is the name he had also an incredible name it was he is he a gender studies professor um and was he he was a sociologist or or

Social scientist, he kept saying that he was a social scientist. I forget exactly what he was. Yeah, he just he had this like, incredible way of speaking. And just, you know, he would, he would just like completely steeped in academic jargon, but he also just had this like kind of impish sort of. It was like a caricature of an academic. I felt like I was watching, like if Christopher Guest made Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show about university life, this guy would be in it.

possibly played by by christopher guest you know you keep throwing all these references and i have no idea so this is going to be this is going to be a big problem Through this podcast, we'll have to also stop and explain references to Sarah. You don't know what waiting for government is?

Oh my God. It's one of the best movies of all time. Oh yeah. No, I don't. Okay. Well, this is Spinal Tap. Are you familiar? You've heard of Spinal Tap. Yeah. I've heard of. Same kind of gang there. Yeah. So this guy was named.

Patrick, it's G R Z A N K A. he's a professor of uh women's studies weirdly i don't think that's i think he must be a professor of gender studies but i'm reading a review here that's calling it uh women's studies anyway yeah i mean he he just um Any time that Matt Walsh would continue to press this question, what is a woman?

um he would just get you know sort of more and more like he said i don't feel safe in this interview i'm not comfortable i'm not comfortable with with the direction this is going in um and at one point he's you know walsh just says like you know i'm just trying to get to the truth that's all and and this guy says getting to the truth is deeply transphobic I mean, it was just there was a moment right in the interview and he wasn't the only one that I think the the the.

uh yeah right they they both reached this point in the conversation where you could tell they were suddenly they were unhappy you know they came in with their to the conversation with their very I'm going to educate you airs friendly or seeming like they're friendly kind of upbeat you know using words like kiddos yes

It triggered me a little bit. I don't know. It's all part of this. Yeah. It's strange. Like there's a lot of words like that. Yeah. And kiddos. Yeah. Yeah. And so they start with this and then, and then there was a moment where they recognize.

I guess, what's happening, or maybe they're maybe being made to look, you know, foolish. And with the professor, it was extremely clear that there was a point where he was, you know, I think it was, yeah, that was a truth point where he's like, why are you concerned?

are you asking um you know and he's immediately thinking that you know this interview is going to be used for the wrong ends and and now i'm suspicious of this whole thing and i'm going to what did they think did they not google matt walsh It's like it's it's completely obvious what side he's on. Yeah. I wonder how does this ever happen? You know, they're all the time. There are these documentaries. And I'm thinking, did this person not Google?

um the person who's interviewing or maybe they weren't told that that would be the but how can they i mean but like you know on you know daily wire matt walsh like there must be unless there was some like production company sort of created as a false front to make these people think that they were dealing with like some kind of like you know progressive

documentary filmmaking team maybe maybe they just thought because it was a documentary it was automatically on the left maybe because that's what documentaries are Yeah. I'm very, I'm very puzzled by this whole thing and, and, and how it came about, but, but I, you know, I, I came away. So, so there was, there's also this. As you noted, this light humor throughout it, kind of this deadpan approach that, that, that Matt Walsh shook. Now I don't know anything about Walsh.

outside of this. I don't, I've never listened to him. His mode that he's often in. Yeah. Oh really? It's very entertaining. Okay. Yeah. I've never. uh never heard him outside of this so i i don't know if this was but it but it reminded me of this the colbert style like back in the back in the day when he would have the colbert pour um this dead pan um

you know, sort of every man kind of questioning, but it was intelligently done in a way that would make the other person kind of look foolish. But in this case, it felt like he didn't have to do much.

poking around to make them look foolish. And that was, you know, I think very effective as a... tool i guess um and then there's a point sort of in the middle of the documentary where it gets very serious and there's discussions of there's there's his father who is um in out on bail in Canada because he misgendered his child.

Um, and, and suddenly things get very serious and they start talking about, you know, the harms of medical transition, um, about the existence of detransitioners. There's one person, um, I forget whose name do you, do you remember? Yeah. So there was a. transgender man named Scott Nugent who really spoke incredibly movingly about the devastating medical

consequences he's had from from transitioning and you know that guy was very much you know this is a biological woman who transitioned to male and he actually he looked very male i would not necessarily have known

if he hadn't said so. But that's usually the case, I feel like, with... transitioners who are are female to male you can it's i mean i don't know maybe maybe you don't you don't feel that way but i often feel like they can they can pass if they've been on testosterone long enough i guess yeah um i mean that this scott nugent was just absolutely outraged and is obviously on a crusade now to stop youth transition. And there were various other people. There was...

Miriam Grossman, who is a child and adolescent psychiatrist. She was the one who was the first to be very critical of the affirmative model types. uh and i actually i i enjoyed what she had to say and then i went and looked her up and it turns out she's like kind of a conservative firebrand and has written like a couple of books with very you know and i i wondered that too like when i was when i was watching it i was like who in their right mind if you're just a if you're just a normal

you know um psychiatrists or psychologists like would you jump into this would you jump into this conversation and be as critical as you are and then and then it doesn't surprise me that the people who are who aren't afraid to do it are people whose politics are just so that they're not going to get canceled. Right, right. Yeah. Miriam Grossman is the author of You're Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposed to the Lies of Sex Education.

and how they harm your child yeah so this is the thing like i you know it was frustrating because you you would get the impression from watching this film that it's conservatives who are leading the march against youth gender medicine and maybe transgender people in general it really it oversimplified an incredibly complicated issue but on the other hand you can't do anything but oversimplify it

So I'm torn here. Like I didn't, I thought that like, I guess ultimately I felt like, you know, he's not going to convince the people that need to be convinced. Like if, if by, if when we talk about this debate, we're talking about trans activists. On one side who. really firmly believe that there are far more trans people than we ever thought. And the fact that kids, you know, the increase in young people showing up at gender clinics is up like 4,000% in the last decade. And you've got...

clusters of girls showing up, announcing transgender identities. You've got seventh grade classrooms where suddenly there's five girls saying this. I mean, it's obviously a social contagion. That's at least a huge part of it. So you've got the people who refuse to acknowledge that it. is or might be a social contagion and anybody who says suggests so is is transphobic okay so there's that crowd and then you've got like the conservatives and the

various phobes on the right trying to keep kids out of bathrooms and issuing these very draconian laws. So it's really like these two extreme lanes when the fact is that most people are in the middle. And, you know, I, for one, I do think there are trans people. I do think that there are transgender children. I mean, transgender adults were...

presumably transgender children at one point. I think it's a very, very, very small percentage of the population, but I do think it exists. And so I think that like most people, if they knew the facts would probably. at least be able to entertain that concept but we can't seem to get to any nuances of this yeah i think i so i guess i i disagree in the in the effect of the movie i mean it's hard to know but

I think the point of it is to mobilize the conservatives. You know, it's to it's to mobilize the average conservative person who who who doesn't know much about what's going on other than, you know, what they might see on Good Morning America.

And they have this, you know, men can't be women, right? And that's what they know how to say. And that's all they know about this issue. So from a mobilizing the conservatives perspective, this movie is probably... going to go a long way like like just to get that party in line with what they think is one what one like their shared knowledge of what they think is happening

And also, you know, maybe what to do about it. So from just from like that perspective, that activist perspective, I always get. In my head, I always step back into the shoes of just from an efficacy perspective, what is this going to do? But then you're right that there are these... there are the people who maybe we need to convince who are, are, who might not be reached by this movie. And, you know, I don't know if, if.

In the end, persuasion is what's going to work here. You know, I kind of have the feeling that the way that we're going to stop or at least stop. with this gender-affirming, very gung-ho model of how to approach this issue is with lawsuits. Many, many lawsuits. And there's going to be a lot of collateral damage. I mean, it's, it's funny because I try not to be hyperbolic about this, but you know, most people.

I have followed this very closely and I've covered this a lot of my podcast and I've made a big point of having people on who are not the usual suspects. the people who are out there talking about it on media. I try to have people we haven't heard from before. I've had at least two trans people themselves who are trans but yet still oppose the kind of popular.

ideology that we have out here. But yeah, I guess it's just, I feel, I tend to be kind of school marmish about this because I feel like in order to get the attention. of the people who will really make a difference people running medical organizations like people in mainstream media people you know the new york times which we're going to talk about in a second and npr like you have to you basically have to make liberals understand

But this is not a movement that is analogous to the gay rights movement. This is a totally different thing. And I think the majority of liberals still don't understand that difference at all. They hear you say something like, well, these kids might not necessarily be trans. They need to have therapy to explore this. The trans activists will call that conversion therapy and the nice liberals will.

go along yeah you know what i i think i think no one understands anything about this issue right like there's there's very we are obsessed with it and where we know a lot about it but there's that's not common and i think the average person is just going along with, you know, the common perspective of their tribe, whatever that is. So I, you know, I think maybe the role of...

you and I is to speak to the liberals. Such a heavy load to carry, Sarah. Well, you know, maybe they'll listen to us. I don't know. They shouldn't make us do their, it's not our job to educate them.

Right. That's true. It's emotional labor. We're making it our jobs. You know what? I'm making it my job. I mean, I feel there's a lot of parallels to the ex-Muslim activism that... you know i've been a part of for a very very long time um and you know the the moderate voices the the kinds of people who really didn't you know they were critical of the religion but and the harmful practices, but had Muslims in their lives and, you know, loved.

you know believers and didn't want anything bad to happen to them like i mean those are ex-muslims for the most part because we have some family members right my mom's a muslim right so i don't want her you know, kicked out of the United States or, you know, whatever crazy thing like that, that actual xenophobes might want. You know, I want her to have religious freedom in the West. So there's...

You know, elements of it that remind me of that conversation, because it was people, I think there were the compassionate voices that were critical of the faith, but also... felt a responsibility to protect Muslims that, you know, didn't get any air. And...

were held back, not just by their own hesitations, you know, of like, oh, am I, if I say this, am I empowering, you know, the right wing or conservatives or whatever? There's that element of it. So there's a self-censoring that's always happening. But there's also the fact.

that that you're kind of swimming upstream if you're trying to convince liberals and progressives or something that they are very or your side you know of something that they are very much inclined not to not to agree with so in the end what happened

is that the people that are talking about Islam are people like Pamela Geller and Fox News hosts, and they were the ones that were taking up all the air. And I wonder... whether it was my whether i could have done something differently um it's all your fault right but what if you know what if it was my own

you know, hesitation of taking up this clear, clear line and worrying all the time how my words will be used that made it so that I actually seated the stage to someone who truly was, you know, truly doesn't care.

about Muslim Americans and their rights, right? So I... way you know this weighs on my mind all the time and i don't know what i have like you you were too conservative like you you held your tongue too much and and so yeah i mean conservative in the sense that i just yeah in this discussion you demurred yeah yeah i think i did and i and i also refused point blank uh to engage with the right um and there were maybe maybe there was one maybe interview that that

i gave that ended up on on like being published on a conservative website but i didn't know that that's where it was going that that's where the writer was gonna like he was he was going to shop at it at different places um but i i you know point blank said that you know i'm not going to go on And I, you know, I don't want to... to just sit there and agree with somebody whose, you know, ultimate agenda is something that I don't agree with. And, you know, I was there on my, you know.

on my on my hill very noble and I don't know if that was in the end good for the discourse whether that was good for you know my cause or even the acceptance of muslims like i don't know if it was it was good for anything because it and i think this happens in a lot of different you know um kinds of discourses where the

moderate voices self-censor yeah um well and then see this is what i always say like if the smart thoughtful people don't speak up the stupid thoughtless people are happy to do the job I mean, this is like when John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry on their podcast were talking about whether or not to go on Fox, right? So Glenn will go on Fox. He will allow himself to go on Fox and John will not go on Fox and Glenn's.

glenn's um justification is that he they can't put words in his mouth he's going to say what he has to say and he thinks it's important to get his message like he stands by what he says he will not like you know be guilty by association and john said I won't go on because those aren't the people I need to reach that audience.

already sort of you know so is inclined to believe agree with some of what i say i need to reach the new york times readers i need to reach the npr people and going on fox news will only Yeah. Yeah. So I think that there was that when I started, I was I was where John McCorder is. And now I've I've I've come around to see.

the Glenn Lowry perspective. It's hard though, because they can, you know, they can't put words in your mouth, but they can certainly shut you down. They can certainly go to commercial at an inopportune time. Right. But if you're so if you're there and if you're making sense. So we think about all the time. There's this like you spiral into into right wing. You know, there's the the the pipeline to.

right-wing conservatism um and that sort of thing is discussed endlessly about what is you know the sort of the gateway drug to more radical right-wing politics but It works in reverse too, right? Like there are people who are watching Fox News who will see somebody like Glenn Lowry who will make sense to them. And they will say, this guy.

you know what, he's making a lot of sense and he's making more sense than the host. And I'm going to look him up and then they look them up and then they see the rest of what Glenn Lowry puts out there and their views are moderated, you know, so that I don't know why we presume that this is just a one way.

It's a one-way slope. You just become more conservative. But of course, it's happening in reverse, too. And why don't we look at that audience? You know, why don't we look at conservatives, too, as people we can win over, right? Like, why is it that? But we have to reach the liberals and we have to reach the New York Times people and not so much. Maybe we can also win over some conservatives to our more empathetic.

right version yeah i mean okay and like let's talk about this with respect to to gender because you know so we're going to talk um about this 12 000 word article that is in the new york times magazine um um It's really a big deal that the New York Times is covering gender, especially youth gender, conversations around transition because historically they haven't covered it.

on the news pages and the opinion pages have been very, very much on the activist side. There's been not really any interest in a nuanced discussion about this at the New York Times. So Emily Bazelon, who's a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. spent eight months reporting this piece. Emily, she's an outstanding reporter. She writes a lot about legal matters. She covers a lot of hot button social issues through the lens of justice and the legal system.

She had an amazing piece last summer when she collaborated with her sister, Lara Bazelon, who's a public defender. Oh, they're related. There are four Bazelon sisters. I'm going to make another reference that you're not going to get. Bazelon sisters, shake it.

I'm just going to let that sit there. I'm going to let that sit there. Okay. So Emily, you know, she has a lot of liberal lefty bona fides. She was at Slate. She co-founded Double X, the Double X. podcast which was the women's section at slate which i loved back in the in the mid-aughts they talked about feminism really with a ton of nuance um and so she she has written a piece really laying out

Some, not all of the complexities of the youth gender question. And she's talked to a lot of clinicians and she's talked to a lot of... Not a lot of kids. I think she said she talked to maybe a couple dozen. I mean, she certainly didn't talk to hundreds. She talked to a couple detransitioners. She talked to heads of clinics. I am torn here because I can see that she's really, she's taking this straight down the middle. This is.

Probably the best we could have hoped for in a New York Times piece. And I can only imagine the hoops she had to jump through with editors and anybody else at the Times. And so I think it's triumphant in a lot of ways, but again.

I felt like the takeaway was, yes, this is complicated. And yes, maybe the activists that we see in social media are not representative of trans people more broadly however the people pushing back are right-wingers and the people facilitating this are the good people on the left and that's just not true at all there are tons and tons of people in the center many many many feminists who are

uh calling this into question and that was erased erased as they say uh it was erased in that i mean like the the matt walsh documentary it was it was just um it's as if they didn't exist And, you know, I think it's because they're thorny for both. You know, if you're a conservative and you want to push a specific agenda about here are the bad liberals, if there are also.

you know, liberals and, you know, even some socialists, you know, feminists who are saying, well, I don't agree with this. That paints a very different political you know, picture. And I think that a similar thing is happening with the New York Times. But what, so did you feel, So how what did you feel like this piece accomplished in terms of, you know, the average person, you don't know that much about the issue. You look into this and.

What do you come away with? I felt like it was the broad survey course. If you were in college and you were going to take the state of... gender medicine and ideology in 2002 101 big survey lecture course and sit in the lecture hall with 500 people this would be the equivalent of that We get a pretty big overview, but we don't see really what's going on on the ground. I mean, it's, I think.

I think so many things. The thing is, too, I'm so steeped in this that I read the piece. I tried really, really hard to read it objectively and from the point of view of somebody maybe who had not. thought about it as hard and as constantly as I have um I mean I I guess I I felt that it really ultimately gave too much credence to the idea that um that this could be anything but almost entirely a social contagion and a social phenomenon. I just personally, I think trans people.

I think trans adults, I think adults can do absolutely whatever they want with themselves. There's bodily autonomy. I think trans people should have every right that anybody else has. It goes without saying, I hope. But we really do have situations where... Pretty young children, children who are not yet in puberty are being medicalized because of dysphoria that in 80 to 90% of cases goes away.

uh after puberty and most of these kids will be gay or lesbian i mean there's an element of uh the trans movement that is pretty homophobic and that's a contradiction that's kind of hard to get your mind around and maybe that's just a different piece maybe yeah to be something that it's not yeah i think that that you're that that That calling it, you know, kind of almost a lecture, right? This very comprehensive piece on like specifically this bit, this, you know.

medical transition and and and the controversy around it um it did it was hard for me to read right i mean just generally like it was hard for me to read a

It was kind of boring at times. Because it was 12,000 words. It was very long, but it was also very... clinical and and very just just descriptive but in a very like and this happened and then this happened and then this happened and there was you know this this one detransitioner and she says that this would have helped her but you don't know anything about this detransitioner

And I would have liked to see that picture painted of who this person is and what happened to her or didn't happen to her. And I feel like the humans who might be... harmed by this you know one war or the other are kind of i i don't know they didn't feel real almost it just felt like a a medical squabble um uh i And again, I understand that this, that Emily Bazelon would be in a tricky situation. I can't imagine what it took for her to write this up.

and how many edits that she had to do and changes that she had to make before it was fit to be published on something like the New York Times. But I wasn't satisfied with it. And I don't know if it answered the questions that I had even about medical transition. So I'm not sure what the average person is getting, getting out of this other than, you know, people disagree, you know.

clinicians disagree um and i feel like you could have said that in a lot fewer words yeah i mean the problem too is there's just not a lot of data I think at one point she talks about how there were like 50 or so surgical procedures done on youth. within the kaiser system within the kaiser permanente system in california so that makes it sound like

there were only 50 procedures done in California, but they're just talking about one particular health network. Like it's the problem with the data too, is that people. People who detransition tend not to return to the clinic. We lose track of them. So, you know, a lot of the data that says that detransition is very rare, that's not really true. Now, does that mean it's incredibly common? We don't know, but we do know that there are like.

dozens and not if not how do you find them how do you find well they're on youtube that's where they are now yeah but that's the you know i mean that's not uh so i i'm sorry for again applying the one the one you know, metaphor I'm very good at making. But when you were studying ex-Muslims, there was kind of a similar problem where when people would look at criticism, like when people would look at how many people are walking away from Islam, they would...

look at, they would look up, say they did a survey of a thousand Muslims in the United States. Then five years later, they would call up all those Muslims again and say, well, how many of you? you know, left the religion. Um, so that might be like one way of doing it. And that would be like the, I guess more.

preferable way of doing it um but often it wasn't you weren't calling those same people again you weren't reaching out to the same people again you were going back to the mosques going back to lists that said these are muslims you know like uh so call these people because they're they already identify as muslim but if you have left the faith

you're not going to be at the mosque. You're not going to be on those, those mailing lists. You know, you, you, how, how, how does anybody even find you if you, if you truly walked away from their faith, from the faith? So there was just.

It was just an inherently tricky issue to see how many people actually left the faith because then they disappear into the population. Right. And unless they self-identify as ex-Muslim in a very, very... public way and why would that you know especially in the in the case of ex-muslims where you were stigmatized and even abused by your family in danger

Right. You're in danger. So you would, of course you would hide. And I think detransitioners are not that different in that they feel that they are... Maybe not under attack, but definitely unwelcome in the conversation. No, they're going to be exiled from the community that embraced them, like, you know. with open arms to say the least. I mean, and that community might be hostile to us. I mean, it's not just exile. I'm sure they are like, yeah, that's the thing is.

When you, you know, in a lot of these cases, when you transition or you announce that you're going to transition, there's like this instant community online that that that greets you that like, you know, a lot of these kids, they've got, you know. various mental health issues they've got socialization issues there's big

overlap with autism spectrum. It's, you know, go down the list. And so to suddenly have a community there, everybody is your best friend and you feel like you belong. That must be very seductive. Really, it seems like the issue is. the question of whether you provide puberty blockers to people before they've gone through puberty. So, you know, we know the statistics that say 80 to 90% of people will.

uh desist after they go through puberty the the a lot of the kids that are announcing that they're transgender not all of them but there is a cohort they're saying they they don't want to go to puberty they they look at what's coming as some kind of you know intrusion in their body they don't want to develop breasts they they don't like to see themselves as whatever sex they are so they announce that they're a different sex and there could be a whole bunch of reasons for that so

the question is is that potentially a serious enough situation that it would make sense to

stop the puberty to medicalize? Or do you say, okay, you know, chances are if you get through puberty, you're going to not feel this way anymore. So you just have to ride it out. Now, I understand that if you are forced to go through puberty and what you feel is the wrong body that must be excruciating because it's going to make it harder to pass and so i can i can imagine a little bit what that must be like um but it seems this is the thing like

I feel like ultimately what we're talking about is a fear of not passing. That is what is at the heart of this because nobody is telling somebody over the age of 18 what they can do or not do with their body. This has to do with kids. And that's what it comes down to. This is a fear of not being aesthetically in line with who you want to be. And I actually understand. I actually can kind of understand that.

But I think we need to be very clear that that's really what we're talking about. I think you're right that that's at the heart of a lot of concerns with, you know. teenagers who worry that once they've gotten too far into their, you know, into their development, that they'll never be able to pass. And there's a lot of hysteria around that in, in the conversations about passing, but I, you know,

If you're framing everything as if I cannot live as the gender that I actually am, you know, every single day, starting now, I'm going to kill myself. It's presented as if I can't. transition tomorrow um it it will mean the end of my life yeah and sometimes sometimes clinicians have actually

said as much in initial meetings. Nobody even had the idea that they might be at a higher risk of suicide, but the clinician will say, well, if you don't allow this child to transition, this is what will happen. And that's the first time it ever popped into anybody's mind. I mean, it's unconscionable. Yeah. Yeah. And there's such a thing as as, you know, creating sort of a symptom pool and and professionals have a lot to do with creating that symptom pool. And and.

I forget the so there's a there's a wonderful at some point, maybe since where it's been an hour and a half almost. So we should probably stop. But in some one of these podcasts, I would love to talk about the work of Edward Shorter. I've been reading his books nonstop, but he... He talks about, you know, in his books, he covers the cultural origins of psychosomatic.

illnesses like throughout history um so he'll talk about you know hysteria and magnetism and and nerves and all these things and he'll he'll he'll he'll cover both you know the medical establishment and and what they thought at the time how something came to be fashionable and then indeed like consensus opinion for a while until it disappeared again and when you look at it

when you look at the trans phenomena from that sort of historical mindset, you've, I mean, to me, it really changed the way that I'm looking at this whole thing. And I'm wondering why, you know, when I read a piece like this, I'm wondering, you know, I guess the piece has accepted something I'm yet unwilling to accept, that this is a quote-unquote legitimate phenomenon, right? And by legitimate, I mean biological. inherent within the person and not a...

you know, culturally induced state. And that is so important. You know, I don't see the point in having this conversation, frankly, in talking about, you know, whether people should or shouldn't be medicated when we have. We haven't arrived at the root.

of the problem to begin with you know how can how can you possibly know if this is the the correct treatment and and and and not instead you know that that yeah you treat them and they say that they feel better and how much of that is the placebo effect how much of that is that you are You know, you're giving in somebody with body dysmorphia, giving somebody who's anorexic drugs to lose weight. You know, I mean...

How do I know this? And the only way I can know this is if we have a deep conversation about what exactly is at the root of. uh, of, of gender, you know, like of, of, of this feeling. And I think that that's what, that's what Matt Walsh talked about this, this, the actual, the, the one question that's on everyone's minds. And. He did not get into it with any level of detail or nuance or anything.

But I think we have to have that conversation and we all have to have it again and again and again, because I'm not I'm not satisfied with what I'm I'm hearing. So a little bit of what like Walsh was going through, which is they were saying all these things.

that don't make sense and don't pass the test of basic logic and reason. And I've had a similar... journey except of course i i i think i steel manned the the opposing armies quite quite a bit more i read a lot more and i still haven't come to a place where i'm i'm satisfied with the with the answer given to me and said there there are all these

other possibilities that feel to me to be very, you know, very likely and frighteningly likely, actually. Like when you say other possibilities, what do you mean? That it is a case of a culturally induced illness. I mean, the anorexia thing is an interesting analogy because... You know, there are pro-Anna, they're called, right? Like, you know, groups on the internet, you can find subcultures that were...

people with severe anorexia will take pictures of themselves and they'll sort of cheer each other on. I mean, it's a sort of very dark corner of the internet. And that is something that would never, ever be sanctioned by any medical professional. Like there is no... version of it it doesn't go out of a cultural kind of container right it stays like you know something something within the internet something that people are doing socially they are being sick together

With the, with the transgender identity, and I'm not saying that it's necessarily sick, but there it's what we have is. a phenomenon where people are expressing themselves this way and there's a community around it and it kind of manifests with you know various kinds of aesthetics and it exists as a as a cultural entity but what has happened is

the medical establishment has gotten on board. And so it has sort of leaped out of the internet and gone into doctor's offices and operating rooms and classrooms and... courts and all the rest and i i think that is actually unprecedented and and the reason that it's happened i guess is because it's politicized i mean anorexia i i'm sure there's a way to you know find some kind of culture war

political angle to it but it's not not not as readily as something with gender like gender because it's an identity category right they can you know they can it can be decided that it's a marginalized group i guess you know anorexic people do not have there's no um like social justice anorexic movement there's not actually i mean there's there's body positivity right but there's it doesn't go the other way interestingly right um but

But yeah, I see. And I think that's like people say, like, why are you so obsessed with this? Or, you know, a lot of the people in the Matt Walsh documentary were saying to him, like, why do you care? Why are you so why are you so interested in this? Like kind of like pull that maneuver.

reason you could care is if you hate trans people right right or if you have some kind of prurient interest or something like that but i mean this i just can't think of anything else in recent cultural history anyway that comes even close to this like this you know there's like you know anime and and cosplay and autism spectrum and bipolar and trauma it just plays out isn't that what culture is right like i mean that's culture right it doesn't get medical that is culture but

Since when does culture get funneled into something so real that people are being given powerful medications and cutting off their body? I think that that. that that that it has happened in fact like this and just not to the same degree because people were not able to communicate to each with each other and create those like those little communities like what you mentioned with um

who are encouraging each other. I mean, now, so now there are other elements to it that... make the social contagion worse and i think um like if it is indeed a social contagion i think there's definitely an element of it that is that is um yes it's obvious that is social and that's obvious and i i yeah i don't really engage with people who denied

that element of it that is at least somewhat there. But I actually think that the medical profession has never been that great about these kinds of things. I mean, there have been, you know... not recent history, but recent as in like, you know, hundreds of years ago, you know, you could say, when hysteria was an actual real medical diagnosis, people like women had, you know, their reproductive parts removed.

because it was seen as that was the cause of strange paralysis or random symptoms that really now you're looking at it with modern... the eyes of somebody who knows something about the way that nerves work and everything. And you're thinking this doesn't make any sense and this is crazy. And yet it was accepted and people got, you know, healthy organs removed.

But not to the same degree. I think you're right that there's something about this that is unique in how quickly it developed in the many ways. ways in which it is supported, you know, and that there's internet culture, there's loneliness, there's so much that's going on that comes together to support it, which makes it...

I think particularly intractable and very difficult to talk about in a critical way. Yeah. Do you think that this could exist without social media? Yes, but not to this degree, but yes. but yes yes it i mean it has yeah it has but just um what what is truly unique is one there's there's of course there's a social media angle of it um which is just a

faster version of what we were doing before. But it's not as if social contagions didn't exist before. They absolutely did. And medical social contagions definitely existed. now you have the actual ability to access these kinds of hormones and treatments that would get you close to resembling the opposite sex. And that is, that really is new.

So I wonder if this was a real possibility 100 years ago, would we have seen a version of this take off 100 years ago? Or if this is just a very, very modern... um phenomena from that perspective but there's also like you know 100 years ago what were gender stereotypes like? I mean, you hear from a lot of these kids and they say things like, well, I don't want to be, you know, I'm looking at Disney princesses and.

ubiquitous online pornography and the way girls and women are depicted in those places are nothing i relate to so i must be a boy you know you hear that kind of thing or you hear you know a very effeminate men or boys who feel that they're just not masculine enough at all, that it might as well be easier for them to be a girl. I mean, I was kind of poking around on D trans Reddit.

uh earlier and somebody was talking about how it was a biological female who had transitioned to male and then de-transitioned and she was talking about how she had like a really big nose and she was very very self-conscious

about her nose and the way she was describing it like no you guys don't understand it's like big it's like huge it's like not even like anything you can imagine and i thought you know and she said honestly part of the reason that i transitioned was that i just thought like it would it would look better if i were

on a man. Like she was saying that. And, you know, and then she was talking about how she detransitioned and then she was worried that the hormones had actually made her nose even bigger. And so there was a discussion about that and, you know, it's, it's, it's heartbreaking. And obviously, you know, somebody could say, well, you're.

you're cherry picking. And that's just one particular story. Yes, that is one particular story. But you know, one thing that I often come back to as somebody who grew up in the seventies and the eighties. You know, there were a lot of ways to be a girl anyway, back then, not so much for boys, but.

You know, you could be like a sporty girl. You could be a girly girl. It actually wasn't cool to be a girly girl like in the 70s. Like, you know, I would say that it was no accident that the two biggest child stars of the 70s were Jodie Foster in film.

and christy mcnichol in tv and they both grew up to be lesbians like there was just there were tomboys and that was cool and so you know what we had sort of after you know second wave feminism was sort of over there was this very the gender binary got much more pronounced you saw girly girl stuff so i'm curious sarah like how did you feel about being a girl when you were growing up

Wow. I didn't see that question coming. That was a long windup. I was just trying to catch you off guard. How did I feel? Well, so I was raised in like a religious.

like home um and i coming from a deeply patriarchal society um i remember thinking from a very early age i didn't think of it in terms of like So, so deep about like, I'm a female and they're males, like not, not so much that, but, but I noticed that, that my father and his friends, you know, we would have people come over like dinner parties or whatever, but in, in.

more religious Muslim societies like they often split just I mean not like anyone's making them but often you know women go into one room and men are in the other room and I think that naturally happens at any place but you know whatever uh but i would notice that you know the men are talking about serious things like they're talking about politics they're talking about war they're talking about

um you know it felt like stuff of you know not just of the world but but stuff of of real relevance you know to to to everyone to humanity you know this these big big concepts and then the women we're talking about. woman things, right? Like cooking and the kids and all this stuff. And a lot of that had to do with, I think, just the way that they were brought up. And everybody in that little group were homemakers. My mother was a homemaker.

and this was like in the 90s when was this 90s yeah so i was i was a girl in the 90s and um so i i had that and i remember thinking that I don't know what I wanted to be, but I didn't want to be like my mom. You know, I didn't want to... cook all day and clean all day. And, you know, I didn't see myself as somebody who would succeed in that, you know, in that kind of life or could stand it really. And I remember being jealous of.

the men and the boys, because they got to talk about important things. And I wanted to, you know, that's what I wanted to engage with. And so I didn't. I didn't, I didn't love being, I guess what you would call like the gender role, but, but I, I didn't love female spaces so much in the ways that, you know, the, at least the ones that there were around me, there weren't like serious women. They were. or what I thought weren't serious women, right?

A lot of it felt like superficial conversations to me, conversations I didn't want to have. And then it was in the strictly religious sense. There was this idea that I would be I would get married and I would have a husband and my husband would be. My, you know, my superior in a lot of ways. And that I would defer to him in many ways. And, you know, so my mother, my mother doesn't call my father by his name.

Ever? Ever. Okay. She says the word husband. Like when she calls him, she says husband. So I thought the word for husband, I thought was like a nickname for him or something. I didn't understand that it was the word for husband. For like a... For like a little while until I was like, oh, wait, everybody. Wait, that's just a that's just a word for husband. But it's disrespectful. What did he call her? By her name. Did you know his name?

yeah i knew his name i knew his name i just which is why it was like weird that she wasn't calling him his name um she was calling him you know the word for husband um which i thought was maybe his nickname i don't know um as a young, young kid, I'm saying. And then when I got older, I was like, oh, she just doesn't call him by his name. That's strange. But there were these deeply inculcated norms of respect towards men, you know, and then it's a one-way street.

and deference to them in so many ways, even in the home. And so that's how I grew up. And of course, I rebelled against that. And I think that if I had been given the option... of you know like if someone had told me like look you can just opt out of all of this you don't have to be a woman you don't have to give you know, give birth. You don't have to get married to any man if you don't want to. You can, you know, you can just opt out of this if you take.

These drugs, they will change you physically, maybe mentally, you know, and you can live a different life. I think I would have been very tempted by them. And it's impossible to put myself back in that position. I hope I was too smart to fall for it. Yeah, I think I probably was. But I know that it would have been very... interesting to me and very tempting to me as somebody who naturally didn't, didn't want the life that was laid out, you know, before me, you know, but, but.

Other than that, my early childhood, there was the whole, you know, girls can be anything. Girls can be, you know, doctors and girls can be, you know, they'll be president and blah, blah, blah. And all these girl power messaging, which was good. you know, and I thought that was good. And I, I'm glad that that was available to me at that time. And I noticed that that started changing, you know, and I think around the time that there's this, this, what we are, what we're seeing now.

is kind of a consequence of... both social media and truly instagram like instagram has a lot has a big role to play here and making women uncomfortable with their own bodies um yeah uh but but also this idea that that that if you are gender non-conforming maybe you are of you know, a different sex in your mind, you know, like you're, you're truly not, not a woman at all. And, and I remember that that, that sort of message started coming. I become, I became.

just cognizant of it as a young woman. And I'm glad I missed the boat there. Yeah. I think being glad you missed the boat is a recurring theme with people over. or 30 28 i guess i don't know yeah um yeah i mean it's really it's it is a movement that is rooted in stereotype in a way that it refuses to admit i mean i guess that's why i was frustrated at the end of the

matt walsh documentary like i guess this is a spoiler alert but whatever you know he comes you know he's going around asking everybody what is a woman what is a woman and they really they can't answer it um and then he goes home to his wife who we haven't met yet in the film and she's they've got I think they've got four kids and she's in the kitchen and she's looking lovely, you know, cooking dinner and, and.

And he says, what is a woman? And she says an adult human female. And I thought, oh, great. OK, let's end. Let's end here. And then she hands him the pickle jar and she says, can you open this? And he opens it. and it's like mic drop that's the end of the film oh like it was so i was so mad i feel like i feel like the pickle jar is now gonna become a meme yeah that was just so It was fine. And, you know, she should have just said that and it was just the end, but they had to put.

I mean, it's a conservative, right? He's a conservative. He has to put his spin on it. It has to be more than that. I'm an adult human female. Also, please help me, strong man.

um in opening yes yeah yeah and i mean so again i mean i think with with the basil on piece it's like it's a very very big broad piece within which there are dozens and dozens of smaller deeply textured pieces to be to be written and that are being written all the time i mean it's being talked about on all kinds of podcasts including mine i mean people are writing about this lisa sellin davis writes about this beautifully

her sub stack. There's de-transitioners like Helena and Grace is another one who's a fabulous writer. I mean, there's not a lack of nuanced. in my opinion productive discussion i just felt like for whatever reason it wasn't represented in the piece that the it was just in either right no in either right if anybody criticizes this it's because they're conservatives and

They don't believe this. They think these people are crazy or lying or they think that... these people should are are bad and should just not have any rights or something like that and it's just it's so there's so much going on with it so it's interesting but the baselon piece that um i don't know if you took a look at the comments but there was the it's the the first

The first few of the readers picks, and those are the ones I always go to, not the NYT picks or whatever, but the reader picks. And the first few were, look, I'm not a conservative. I'm not right wing. And, you know, I find that there's a lot here that we need to talk about. And that was it was interesting to me that that was that those were the ones that were recommended by so many like so many people because they I think they read that bit about, hey, this is.

right-wing backlash and they thought no it's you know No, it's not. Yeah. No, I mean, I am a lifelong moderate Democrat, but I strongly object to medical transitions for people under the age of 18. That's disingenuous, right? I mean, and that's disingenuous. Even if this piece that's very good, it's disingenuous to pretend.

like the pushback is conservative conservative conservative even as she covered the detransitioners and they voiced their you know in a sentence or two they they they they said one thing or another but she didn't present that and then like those people are also the people talking about this and they're also the people pushing back against this and um

yeah it was it was it was that part was very frustrating to me but she's also getting you know she's getting beat up on twitter by the trans activists oh yeah hateful and it's just vitriolic i don't envy it's it's impossible it's an impossible situation um and but i but that is why it has to be engaged with like it's it's it's impossible if only one person is doing it

at a place like the New York Times. I think if everybody kind of steps in and allows themselves to be part of this discussion, it will be so much less scary. because the vast vast majority of people want to have a reasonable you know i know so many people that um don't talk about this issue like so many so many of my friends who are who are you know writers and and and public you know intellect and vast majority on the the the moderate left to the to even the far left some of them who have um

who have doubts about this or sometimes just straight up don't believe the, the, the mainstream narrative of what's going on. And very few of them, you know, some of them. some of them even, even said like explicitly to me, I'm never going to talk about this. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to, I don't, I never want to talk, talk about this.

And I think because they have kids in school. I mean, they have a lot to lose. Is that your impression? Yeah, right. They don't want to, they don't, I mean, especially if you were in the public space and, you know, you're a thinker or a writer, this is a black mark.

something that very few people are willing to to um you know put on their resume because it's a huge it's it's something that follows you forever um and why would why would somebody who's who's not like directly affected by this, put themselves in the line of fire in this way. And I think that that's the, for many thinkers and writers who want to be welcome at the New York Times for the occasional piece, I mean, why would they engage?

And I've seen this happen before, right? I've seen that all of this has happened before. And what it led to was just a space where no one could talk about...

what was obvious. And there were political implications to that as well. I mean, we're in the United States where the ex-Muslim issue didn't really, wasn't as effective, or I'm sorry, as important in terms of... our specific policies but in europe where there's you know they have many many many migrants coming in they have to have all these like

broad initiatives to integrate the migrants who are primarily Muslims into the population. And this is a very, it's a very real issue for people on the ground there. Right. And, and yet. Their discourse is just as absurd as the one we have here. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I understand why people would be afraid to speak out if they have kids that are going to be impacted. I mean, just there's there's a lot of stakes. And as somebody who has really nothing to lose, I don't have I don't I don't have kids. I don't have a post at the New York Times. I feel like if those of us who are able to speak out, if we don't.

I, this sounds histrionic, but we're going to have blood on our hands. I really think so. I mean, I, I do ultimately, I, I want to discuss this as carefully as possible and I don't want to be hysterical, but I do think that this is an enormous medical. scandal and we're going to look back on 10 years it we're going to look like in 10 years the way we look back at like the satanic preschool panic and recovered memory syndrome times 100.

it's going to be exponentially more destructive than those trends. So we'll just mark my words. Well, I'm listening to you, Megan. I'm listening. I'm listening to you. I think this has been a good start. What do you think? Have we have we repelled everybody? Have we? Yeah, I think. Yeah, now our audience is down to 10. So thank you to the 10 listeners. So that's more than we started with. Yeah. All right. Well, a special place in hell.

I've enjoyed being here with you. Yeah. This has been, this has been great. We'll do it again. And people, if you, if you, if there's anything, if, if, if anybody's listening. Please write to us and tell us what you'd like us to talk about. Where can people find you, Sarah? You can find me on Twitter, sadly. But you can find me on Twitter. But if that's too annoying, I appreciate people subscribing to my sub stack. That's called Hold...

that thought. Um, but you can just look up Sarah Hader and you'll find it. Um, and there you can, you know, even, even you don't, you don't have to be a paying subscriber. Of course, I really appreciate that, but I just want, I just want to build, um, and, and, and audience there because it makes me it makes me nervous to just be have just have twitter as my really i don't know why that would make you nervous it's such a secure place to be okay yeah um yes and i can be found at at megan

m-e-g-h-a-n underscore dom d-a-u-m uh and also um at the unspeakable podcast which is my other podcast unrelated to this one although probably some overlap with topics and yeah, this is a sub stack podcast we should say, but you know, we're, we're very much in beta mode here. So you who are listening are part of this grand experiment with us. So thank you. Thank you for being with us and we will find our way. all right until next time all right thank you megan