Welcome to The Reality Taboo, where no topic is off limits. It's February 27, 2026. I'm Jeff. Joining me is my co -host, Ness. First topic is transgenderism. I want to start by going through a few recent mass shootings involving transgender shooters. First, Ness spoke about this case recently, so I won't go into too much detail, but there was the Covenant School shooting in Nashville,
Tennessee in March 2023. The shooter was a woman named Audrey Hale, age 28, opened fire at the Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school in Nashville, killing three nine -year -old children and three adult staff members before being shot and killed by police. Hale had been in psychological counseling since age six and remained in counseling until her death. She had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder
and described herself as neurodivergent. So among the many things she wrote in these journals, it included, quote, there is a better place than being in these bodies, forced to live in them, and quote, I'm in the wrong body. Want to kill you? little crackers, bunch of little faggots with your white privileges, and I hope I have a high death count. So she had some anti -white feelings and also some anti -Christian feelings. She wrote, quote, if God won't give me a boy
body in heaven, then Jesus is a faggot. And so it appears from the manifesto that Hale's gender identity distress was not incidental to her psychology but was deeply entangled with a broader constellation of unresolved psychiatric conditions. So she had at some various points she had been diagnosed with autism, bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation, and then was obsessed with death. Throughout
her life. And so that teases about what we're going to get into later is this transgenderism is sort of overriding and overtaking all of these other mental health issues and obscuring what's going on. just remove gender dysphoria or transgenderism from being a mental illness to essentially being normal and just as valid as any other sexual identity, homosexuality, heterosexuality. And so if you're trying to treat somebody like hail, And you're essentially removing the fact that
she's transgender. You're essentially disentangling that from all this other constellation of mental health issues she has and saying the transgender issue is perfectly fine. In fact, it should be celebrated and encouraged. But we're still going to treat these other presumably unrelated mental health issues of bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation. which at least as of now are still
considered mental disorders. But I mean, on the logic of saying transgenderism is no longer a mental disorder, I don't know what would stop any of these other things from just being declared not to be mental health disorders either. So Ness, I'm going to turn it over to you. You've looked quite in depth at the manifesto that Hale left. What do you think is left out in coverage?
of the Covenant School shooting. It's a clear indictment of the modern therapy, therapeutic industry that this woman was in counseling for two decades and the end of that journey through perpetual therapy and counseling and psychotropic drugs, presumably. And that whole battery of psychological assessments was that she ended up killing a bunch of children and effectively
electing to go out through death by cop. And so I think that needs to be first and foremost, the understanding that this is a total indictment. It will go through a bunch of other similar situations where people who are rather than psychologically analyzed. In an honest way, instead are affirmed in their delusions of which transgenderism is the most delusional of all. It is an abomination. It's a clear inversion of the most basic realities
about human biology. Other people are sucked into the delusion, and that's where you get the pronouns where the politically correct thing to do is to call them by their preferred pronouns. And you see that kind of leaking out into overall society where you still see on LinkedIn or email signature lines, you'll see pronouns, she, her,
or he, him. It reminds me of... During COVID, when it was known pretty early on that masks were useless, especially maybe you could make an argument the surgical grade masks provided some benefit, but the mask that the vast majority of people were wearing, just pieces of cloth, and many of them weren't even wearing them correctly. So they weren't providing any real benefit. And yet everybody was... There was tremendous social pressure to accept the delusion that masks did
anything. And the common retort was, well, what's the big deal? Why can't you just wear the mask? Why are you making a big deal out of it? I think it is a big deal in a similar sense of what's the big deal? They want to be called he instead of her. Why do you have to make such a big deal about it? Ordinary people are forced to essentially believe that the emperor has clothes when reality shows clearly he doesn't have clothes. And I think that's what's happening with transgenderism.
I think that's a pretty standard. playbook that is run by GloboHomo to talk about what we discussed last week. The pattern is remarkably familiar, and we can see the same thing with transgenderism, where first the push is to tolerate. That's what Jeff was talking about, where, hey, what's the big deal? Just go ahead and call them by the pronouns that they want to be called by. I think we're past that. It goes from toleration and then into celebration, which is the parades.
and all of the other things where people are put on a pedestal as though they are morally superior because they have these gender fluid identities. And then it goes to, after tolerate and then celebrate, it goes to participate. And if we get into the data on how people self -identify, we'll see that there has been an order of magnitude increase in the youngest cohort of Americans who identify as transgender relative to generations
past. And fundamentally, the embrace of transgenderism is an antithesis, an acrimony for nature, for physical reality. And that was very present reading
through Hale's over 100 -page manifesto. The coverage included that we put together an AI summary to get an idea of how Hale's shooting was covered at the time, and there was a lot of emphasis on this putative desire by Hale to gain notoriety from the action, but I think that was intentionally obfuscating the real motivations, which were not for notoriety, were not for fame, but instead were deeply and viscerally anger
at being female instead of being male. at being white and being raised in a Christian society. So it was on all of those dimensions, on the sexual one, the racial one, and the heritage or spiritual one, and all of those angles and all those dimensions, Hale was driven by a deep
self -loathing and self -hatred. And though all of those dimensions were the things that Hale, in her own words, based on the notebook that was released by the FBI, made public eventually, not in the first months after the shooting occurred, but subsequently, all of those dimensions were very much downplayed in media reports immediately following the incident. So Hale, you mentioned, had hatred for her race, for her religion, for the society around her. And she was white, of
course. I think that's something that the elevation of victimhood in our culture to essentially it being there's the hierarchy, the oppression Olympics, the oppression hierarchy, where you have black women at the top and white men at the bottom.
I think that plays into that. inculcation of self -hatred for white kids i think that creates a very difficult psychological paradigm for young white people to exist in and it's especially it's even more difficult for white women they have i believe the highest rate of mental health of any demographic group are white women they have the highest rates of mental illness and so somebody like that a white female who is inculcated with self -hatred, well, the only way she can
essentially rise up in the hierarchy of oppression is to adopt a transgender identity. I guess she could become a lesbian, but there's even a higher step up nowadays with transgenderism. So that's the best a white girl can do in terms of rising up in the social hierarchy. And another pattern that Hale falls into that you will see repeated with these transgender shooters is they are terminally
online. And so they're just drenched in Reddit culture, online forums that just amplify and confirm all of their delusions, such as transgenderism. Through repetition, they try to do that, but as much as... biology can try to be suppressed it still finds ways to rear its Ugly or beautiful head, depending on the perspective that you're taking. That was something that was evident to and going through Hale's manifesto is that she was love struck by some unnamed Hispanic woman.
And though she may have been lesbian or fancied herself a male who was just heterosexual, whatever the case was, it was clear that that affection she had that lost was unrequited. And that is not at all surprising because most. women aren't lesbians to start. And even if this Hispanic woman was a lesbian, the things that women who try to look like a sad simulacrum of a man go through makes it so that they are not attractive to anyone, male, female, heterosexual, homosexual.
And so there was that toxic mix of self -hatred about everything about Hale's identity. Paired up with a total frustration in having an unrequited love go completely unfulfilled. And so that confluence of factors is what that on top of decades of therapy sessions that probably did more to make. hails problems worse to facilitate and perpetuate them rather than offer some sort of solutions to them. Those things together is what led to a bunch of the three children and three staffers
at the school being killed in cold blood. And we've talked about all of the social factors that play into these things happening. But there's also the physical environment, the toxic physical environment that we're increasingly inundated with, whether it's vaccines, which as much as the scientific community, quote unquote, claims that there's absolutely no connection between vaccines and all of these mental health issues, specifically autism. I'm not so sure, but that's
beyond the scope of this episode. Needless to say, the vaccines, the constant pharmaceuticals, the horrible diet, the processed foods. I mean, obesity rates I heard are among children. It's something like 20 to 30 percent now in the United States. So all of those things combined, it's hard to pick apart any one factor. But I think that's leading to these this rise in transgenderism. and other mental health issues. Moving ahead to August 2025, there was the Annunciation Catholic
Church shooting in Minneapolis. The shooter was Robert Westman, biological male, identified as a transgender female. He was 23, so he opened fire outside a Catholic church during mass and killed two children and injured 18 others and then died of a self -inflicted gunshot wound. So Westman wrote in his manifesto that he was, quote, tired of being trans and that he wished he had, quote, never brainwashed, end quote,
himself. And Westman's mother went along with affirming Roberts' delusion and helped him get his name changed to reflect that identification. And this gets at, again, another common pattern you see. We'll see it next getting ahead of ourselves with the Tumblr Ridge shooting up in British Columbia. But a common pattern for these young transgender shooters is their parents went along with it and affirmed their child's delusion. I'll just get into the next shooting, the Tumblr
Ridge shooting. Like I said, it happened just recently in February of 2026 in British Columbia, Canada. Jesse Van Rootseller was a biological male identified as a transgender female. He was 18 years old. He first shot and killed his mother and his half -brother at their home and then went to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School where he killed six people, a teacher and five students, and then he killed himself. And 27 other people were injured, and it was the deadliest school
shooting in Canadian history. And again, another pattern here. Van Rootseller had an extensively documented mental health history. He had been diagnosed with ADHD, major depressive disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and OCD. He had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons. He had a documented history of polysubstance abuse, including psychedelics. And the police had made numerous visits to the family home over prior years and at least one time had seized firearms
for the residents. And his home life was as dysfunctional as you might expect. Broken family. The father was not involved hardly at all. And the mother uprooted Van Rootseller and his siblings multiple times, moved all the way across Canada to the East Coast and then back to British Columbia. So when this story was first being reported, at least in the mainstream corporate, press, the killer was repeatedly characterized as a woman. And the vast majority of murderers are
male. So the fact that there was a mass shooter that was female was notable in and of itself. And it actually turned out to be not true. And as woke as the United States can seem at times, Canada is far more woke. And since So again, another example of first it started with just personal preference, just leave people alone,
let them live their lives how they want. And you can see how it spreads out and out and becomes... toleration to actively praising, and then it's bad enough that the delusion would be confined to one person who's directly experiencing the delusion, but that delusion is expanded outwards and other people are forced or at least pressured
into engaging and sustaining the delusion. So if we look at this as like a mind virus, then what needs to be done is it needs to be quarantined and isolated and then it will die on the vine, but instead what happens is all of society is remade in a way that makes it culturally necessary to, again, tolerate, celebrate, and then participate because there not only is the delusion something that has to be accepted, but there is a status striving boost that goes along with having that
status. And one thing that is particularly pernicious is that there are real world consequences to people who adopt these gender bending identities, like Audrey Hale, who thinks that she is a... man and makes herself appear like a simulacrum of a man and it makes her unattractive to everyone and so she suffers in a real way she does get a status boost from being transgender but then she also has real world consequences that she suffers because of it so there is a big incentive
for mothers in particular to try to push this transgenderism on their children so that they can benefit from the status boost that they get by having transgender children without having to suffer the consequences directly that accrue naturally from being trying to represent oneself as something other than what that person biologically is and that consequence is especially pronounced at younger ages when male and female hormones are firing the most when people are the most
sexually active and romantically interested there's a concept in transgender culture called passing and i again i haven't done a deep dive into it but my understanding is that that's something that is strived for that you the kind of the pinnacle of being a trans person is if you're a a man and you're able to whatever, castrate yourself and use makeup and surgery and whatever drastic measures you want to use to the extent where you can go out and attract the sexual attention.
of a biological heterosexual man. Ness was talking about the hormones at a young age, firing and puberty and all those kinds of things. Well, if your goal is to pass, then you're going to have best results the earlier in your life, the better, ideally. before puberty kicks in. And so you can use, if you're a girl and you say you're a boy, then you could take estrogen blockers and testosterone injections and just completely
mess with that natural hormonal balance. And maybe in this bizarre Frankenstein creature experiments, maybe you can end up, if you're a girl, looking more like Yeah, that's possible, but this Hawaiian, not to sound like a feminist, like a first or second generation feminist, but the transgender parameters are such. that things like passing inherently are more beneficial to men trying to pass as women than they are for women trying
to pass as men. Because of course, the puberty process that men go through results in a massive increase in bone density and upper body strength and body hair and all of these things that simple estrogen reductions and testosterone injections into... actual girls into women with ovaries and no testes. They may look like more tomboyish girls, but it is virtually impossible to get a woman to look like a man and pass as a man.
It's much easier, especially if the injections, the hormonal treatments are done pre -pubescent to boys to make boys pass as women. But more simply, this Secondary sex characteristics that men develop in puberty are more differentiated from prepubescence than they are for women who will develop breasts but otherwise essentially stay as they were prepubescent. So it's a tall order. It's a future of sufferance for both boys who try to pass as women as they pass through
that. puberty threshold but it's an even taller order for girls who try to pass as men so i think all children are harmed to put it mildly by being affirmed or having even worse having this transgenderism ideology pushed on them but girls in particular are especially harmed there is the Phenomenon of things like ladyboys in Southeast Asia, where there are boys and eunuchs, of course, throughout
history, gelding boys prior to puberty. meant that they would develop into adulthood and something that could pass with enough disguising as female, at least at first blush, but that has really never been the case for girls to pass as men. The snoo -soo thing from Futurama aside, that isn't something that ever actually happens. There isn't Amazonian women who, if they cut their hair shorter, will pass as Herculean men. You
obviously haven't seen Disney's Mulan. No, I haven't, but there are a bunch of obvious reasons as to why men pretending to be women has had a catastrophic effect on women's sports, whereas women pretending to be men has had absolutely no impact on male sports whatsoever, because when it comes to physical prowess and the like, you can take a boy and... pass him as a girl and he's still going to have that physical prowess but take a girl and try to have her pass as a
boy and while there might be some marginal benefits from testosterone injections in terms of developing greater muscle mass or bone density it's not going to come one one hundredth of the way to bridging the natural athletic gap that exists between the average post -pubescent man and post -pubescent woman. Last transgender shooting is the one that occurred just a few weeks ago, also in February of 2026, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
The shooter was Robert Dorgan, also known as Roberta Esposito, who was a biological male. most of these shootings. He, Dorgan, opened fire at a youth hockey game in Pawtucket on February 16th. He shot his ex -wife, Rhonda Dorgan, their adult son, Aiden Dorgan, Rhonda's parents, Linda and Gerald Dorgan, and a family friend. So you may have noticed something strange. I certainly did when I was researching this story. ex -wife
of the shooter is named Rhonda Dorgan. Okay, that's a little weird that she would still have the same name as her ex -husband. But in some cases, if a man and woman have been married a long time, there are instances where they get divorced and the woman just keeps the married name. But also, Rhonda's parents also have the surname Dorgan. That is not a common last name. I think it's Irish, but it's not a common last
name. So something flashed in my mind. Why would Rhonda's parents have the same name as her ex -husband? And apparently Rhonda and Robert, the shooter, were first cousins once removed. So I wasn't able to figure out exactly what their blood relationship was. Presumably it was a little too close for comfort. I mean, they had the same last name. And the court records show that Robert Dorgan's gender identity had been at the center
of significant family conflict for years. And Rhonda filed for divorce in February 2020, and she cited in her divorce paperwork, quote, gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic and personality disorder traits. And a day before the shooting, there was... a post on Twitter referring to transgender congressman from Delaware, I believe. So there's one transgender congressperson, and there was a post about that, a derogatory post about him. And Dorgan wrote in response, quote, keep bashing
us, but do not wonder why we go berserk. So admittedly, this doesn't really fit into, at least from what I can tell, previous transgender shooting incidents. This guy was much older, well into adulthood before he apparently adopted this transgender identity. He was presumably a relatively normal heterosexual person. He had a wife and children. So I don't really know what to make of this one. And it's still pretty new, so new information is still coming out. And so we zoomed in a little
bit and looked at individual cases. Now I want to zoom out a little bit and say, does the data indicate that the average transgender person is more likely to commit violence than the general population? And I think the answer is not really, at least from what I could tell. There's one source I found called the Violence Prevention Project. noted one transgender shooter appearing among 201 mass shooters recorded between 1966
and 2025. And then there are, in a broader definition, there's five to seven confirmed transgender shooters out of roughly 5 ,700 incidents between 2013 and 2025. And we're going to look in depth more at the Gallup data, but as a teaser, it indicates that about 1 .1 % of American adults identify as transgender. So that would be about 2 .9 million people out of an adult population of approximately
260 million. So using that denominator, basically from the data that I was able to find, transgender identifying individuals are underrepresented in mass shootings. But isn't that because the vast majority of mass shootings are gang -related shootings in urban areas between various groups of blacks shooting other blacks? I think the relevant statistic that we're trying to get at is what is the likelihood, what is the multiplier
or divisor? that distinguishes people who identify as transgender versus those who do not in terms of these public mass shootings that target people that they do not know and that they do not directly have beef with because if mass shootings as they are characterized in crime statistics if the qualification to label something as a mass shooting
is that at least four people are injured. Again, the overwhelming number of those are gang -related shootings where there are turf wars and the like and there are shootouts and multiple people are
hit. But that is a different animal really than what we're looking at here when we're looking at psychological, deep psychological motivations that cause people to go out and try to inflict the most harm on the groups that they feel are most deserving of their wrath because of the anguish that these groups are perceived to cause the transgender shooters. don't affirm their pronouns, then you're denying their existence.
This is existential, over -the -top language that creates, at least makes a certain amount of sense, why people would lash out when those kinds of actions are interpreted or equated with violence. It's not shocking that those putative victims would lash out violently as well. And the common refrain is, That's basically put in front of a parent who has a child who's claiming to be transgender. The parent is asked, would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter?
The damage that is inflicted on others by people with transgender mental disorders is a tragedy, of course. Primary problem that stems from embracing the. mental illness that is transgenderism, definitionally, the inability to recognize reality for what it is, is the harm that it does to the transgender person in particular. I think the self -harm, the suicidal ideation, and the other attendant mental health problems that have as a consequence self -inflicted self -harm is the bigger issue
here. And the correspondence to a rise in rates of depression along along with a rise in the rates of self -identified transgenderism among younger Americans, is the bigger societal problem here. The numbers that we referred to earlier with regards to alphabet soup, self -identification, LGBTQ +, etc. from Gallup 2025, the most recent Gallup. Survey data available shows that 9 % of American adults, so that's 1 in 11, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or some
other non -heterosexual identity. And there is a massive generational effect at play here. Among those age 65 and older, just 2 .3 % identify as a member of the alphabet soup. Among those under the age of 30, 23 % do. And so that is quite literally an order of magnitude higher. People, Zoomers and Gen Alpha, people under the age of 30 are 10 times more likely to identify as non -heterosexual than people. 65 and older
are. And that suggests strongly that there's not some underlying biological reality driving this, but that instead it is a social phenomenon. And that goes back to what we were talking about with the therapy sessions. And as Jeff will get into the shifting definitions of what constitutes
mental illness. the tldr on it is that what was historically recognized as mental illness is now rather than being deemed something pathological is instead being inverted and being celebrated as something that is not again not pathological but instead should be aspirational and there are a lot of other consequences that come along with that because if the most basic truths Biological realities about human existence are denied, inverted,
and then people are forced to affirm lies. Well, there are going to be a lot of other downstream consequences from that mental health related consequences in particular. I'm going to flag the environmental toxins that I think are contributing at least partly to this increase in transgender and LGBTQ more generally. identification. So the increase in rates of autism is staggering, and I don't have any evidence for this, but I think the increase in autism and transgenderism
are, I think there are common causes. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, is the primary diagnostic reference in American psychiatry. Its treatment of gender identity has evolved substantially. And I think tracking some of those changes highlights the broader societal patterns that we've been discussing.
And it shows how the evolution of something that's ostensibly rigorous and evidence and based on the scientific method is actually controlled perhaps primarily by activist pressure more than clinical evidence. You had mentioned COVID previously, but of course, there are very obvious similarities there with the way that the whole COVIDian nightmare was handled. I wasn't going to go there, but
my mind did go there. And yes, there's so many examples, but one that just comes to mind real quick is Dr. Anthony Fauci in February 2020. gave a very nonchalant answer regarding masks. He says masks, he was asked whether COVID was first popping up in the United States. A reporter asked Fauci, should people be going around wearing masks? And Fauci said, no, there's no reason to wear masks. I mean, masks might make people feel better, but it's not going to provide any
real protection. And then what, a month or two later, it was... Now everybody's got to wear a mask. You're a selfish person if you don't wear a mask. So within the span of a month or two, we just did a complete 180. And that was just the first of many examples to come where it's like Oceania has always been at war with East Asia in 1984 where we've always worn masks even though we were just told a couple weeks
ago that masks were pointless. Well, it's a – especially salient with COVID because of how compressed the timeline was. But... Gender dysmorphia, or whatever the DSM calls it, is just one of many examples. There are other pathologies or things that historically were understood to be pathologies that the DSM has since recharacterized
as not being pathological at all. It's not just transgenderism, but it is the whole bevy of LGBTQ type of things, homosexuality being another one of those conditions that was recognized historically in the history. of Western medicine and psychology as being something pathological, but that is no longer viewed as such. So going back, looking back at some of these iterations of the DSM.
So in 1952, in the 1952 and 1968 editions, cross -dressing and gender nonconformity were subsumed under the category of general sexual deviations, and these were classified as mental disorders. And then the DSM -3 in 1980 introduced explicit categories. Transsexualism and Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood, and these were also both formal mental disorders. And then the DSM -IV in 1994 retained gender identity disorder as
a diagnosable mental condition. And then the big change came in 2015 with the DSM -V, and gender identity disorder was replaced with gender dysphoria, and that's the term that is still
used today. And this was a deliberate... political reframing so the distress associated with gender identity became the diagnosable condition not the gender identity itself and this is somewhat analogous to the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the dsm and this is the psychological or psychiatric equivalent of looking at instead of the underlying medical condition that a physician might look at to instead treat the symptoms as the problem rather than the underlying condition
as the problem. So someone has cancer, instead of trying to eradicate the cancer, the focus instead becomes treating the hair loss by adding a hair thickener or trying to get society to instead of looking at the physical manifestations of cancer as it progresses is something that is unfortunate that to instead to celebrate these
things. And so it is not surprising from this vantage point that as these pathological conditions have been recharacterized as things that are simply more akin to variations in personality and that the real underlying problem is the way that society deals with those divergent personalities instead of looking at the underlying sexual dysmorphia as the problem well it's not surprising then that the issues that manifest from those underlying conditions that aren't being treated but instead
are being affirmed and even celebrated that those problems continue to get worse and so again to reclimate back to what i said previously it does not seem coincidental or surprising to me that as these mental health problems are recharacterized as things that should be celebrated or at the least treated neutrally, that corresponds to a seeming ever -increasing rise in rates of suicidal ideation and self -described depression and all of these other psychological attendant problems.
One way to illustrate this change in the depiction of transgenderism is to look at pop culture. So a show like MASH, which ran from 1972 to 1983, there was, throughout the entire run of the show, there was a character named Maxwell Klinger, and he wore women's clothing as a sustained scheme to obtain a Section 8 psychiatric discharge from
the Army. And this entire comedic premise rested on an assumption that the audience shared without question, that Inherently, a man wishing to dress and present as a woman was self -evidently a sign of mental disorder. It was a joke. It was more an affectionate joke rather than a cruel one, but it was very obvious that the underlying premise was unambiguous. Again, the show ran until 1983, and there was never any network sponsor or critic that raised an objection, at least.
no one of note that raised an objection regarding this. Corporal Klinger. There's a thriller film from 1980 called Dressed to Kill, and it features a killer who is a biological male psychiatrist with a split personality. There's one kind of like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type of situation. There's one side that presents as a respectable professional and the other as a violent female persona who murders women that the male side is attracted to. of transgenderism and cross
-dressing with dangerous mental illness. And then you have the 1991 film, The Silence of the Lambs, which was based off a novel published in the 1980s. The main villain is Buffalo Bill. He is a biological male who murders women in order to construct a woman's suit from their
skin. driving uh desire is to become female and again this film came out in 1991 it won best picture at the academy awards it's just almost inconceivable to imagine a movie like this coming anywhere near that level of widespread critical acclaim though it leans more in the uh mash direction rather than the silence of the lambs direction the 1992 movie ladybugs that was not critically acclaimed but did make an impact on yours truly it was a lowish middle brow comedy based on the
absurd notion that men being allowed to pretend to be women and play in women's sports would destroy women's sports the plot of the story is that A character played by Rodney Dangerfield. Later, Rodney Dangerfield is in a position where he needs to take his boss's girl soccer team to the championship, and he... In puffing himself up, misrepresents himself to his boss as someone who is knowledgeable about soccer. But in reality,
he is clueless about soccer. But he thinks, well, it's a dynasty and he'll be able to take the team to the championship anyway. But there's only one person returning from the previous year's championship team. And he gets a bunch of other girls. He has no idea how to coach them. And it looks like his plan is heading for disaster. until he decides to bring his stepson in and have his stepson pretend to be a girl. His stepson
does so and dominates on the field. Eventually, through the leadership and the prowess of that stepson, the rest of the girls learn how to play soccer and ultimately win the championship with the son being removed at halftime. But then the closing vignette shows that... Rodney Dangerfield is now in charge, is now a coach of a women's softball team, and they're going to like the
state or national championship. And as they're getting off the bus, Rodney Dangerfield character tells them to put all their wigs on because to dominate in softball, he instead of just having a single boy play in girls soccer, he's decided to make his entire team consist of boys pretending to be girls and the. Obvious conclusion from this is that they are going to utterly dominate.
And so while it was not critically acclaimed, the premise of the movie worked as a punchline because of how absurd it was seen to be, because of how absurd it actually is, just like in Silence of the Lambs, how it was not at all seen as some sort of aberrant view to look at gender bending
as some sort of... It was also similarly understood that the biological realities underlying sexual differences made it such that men pretending to be women was inherently ridiculous and there would be a socially disruptive cost associated with pretending otherwise. That's certainly generally true, at least in our lifetimes. The situation on trans though, I wonder if perhaps it could provide a counter example to that general constant unyielding leftward turn. There seems to be,
this is more of a vibe shift. And I think it will be not just a vibe shift, but something backed up by some amount of hard data. But there seems to be a backlash in the last, I would say, maybe around the time Elon Musk bought Twitter. I don't know if that's directly related, but maybe around 2023 up till now, it seems like there's been, at least in the United States, a cultural backlash against transgenderism. And that manifests in various ways. I want to start
with maybe more highbrow. example of this which is the cash review it was the most significant it's probably arguably the most significant institutional challenge to the whole gender affirming care model paradigm Its formal title is The Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People. It was commissioned in 2020 by the National Health Service in England. It was led by Dr. Hilary Cass, who is a retired consultant pediatrician. And the final report
was published in April 2024. And so it's essentially a meta -analysis. It looks at It doesn't do any new research. It just looks at a bunch of previous, it does eight independent systematic reviews of the global evidence base. Basically, it found that the evidence such as it is for both puberty blockers and cross -sex hormones was of poor
quality. And so the original Dutch study that had served as the foundation for the entire treatment model showed small improvements in psychological well -being, but no improvement in gender dysphoria itself. And the study found, the cash review found, that 98 % of young people started on puberty blockers went on to cross -sex hormone. So these puberty blockers were often presented to parents as a reversible intervention that simply bought
time to think. And in reality, they were almost exclusively functioning as a first step on a one -way medical pathway. And another top -line conclusion from this cash review is that the evidence does not support the claim that gender -affirming treatment reduces suicide risk. So the CASH review also found a phenomenon it describes
as diagnostic overshadowing. It's a young person's gender distress becomes a singular clinical focus, crowding out proper assessment and treatment of co -occurring conditions, including depression, anxiety, autism, spectrum disorder, and trauma. As we saw with those shooters earlier, almost all of them have one or all of these mental disorders.
But with this gender paradigm that's been shoved, that's been introduced in the last few decades, the gender aspect, the supposed gender dysphoria essentially overshadows all those other things. And they are perhaps not emphasized as much as they should be if to be treated instead. the overriding focus is on the supposed gender dysphoria.
To keep the comparison with physiological problems going, imagine that the physician's diagnosis is cancer or would be cancer and other attendant problems like... feebleness and problem with digestion and hair loss but if we rewrite the book on physical ailments to proscribe cancer from that list and so we instead treat cancer as something that is central to the identity of the patient and then we try to address the other problems like hair loss and weakness and
problems with digestion but we won't touch trying to deal with the cancer because cancer isn't a problem. It is actually something that should be celebrated. It's something that's aspirational and it's something that all the other health considerations need to be modified around to not get at changing that cancer diagnosis. We see the same thing with gender dysphoria. That is the pinnacle. That is the ultimate mental disorder in terms of totally inverting biological
reality. And so if that is not treated as a mental disorder, then trying to deal with the other less severe mental problems without touching that underlying central node in the mental illness that is afflicting the person, well, the other treatments are going to be ineffective at best. So people's gut reaction against transgenderism and just the absurdity of a boy saying he's a girl or vice versa or the absurdity of a man playing in women's sports, that is, I think,
primarily responsible for the vibe shift. For whatever reason, people are feeling more free to express what is very natural. which was taken for granted only 20 years ago. There's also clear empirical evidentiary basis for the whole idea. I mean, the whole, just the word gender affirming care is a political term. It's, you're just using that term, you're playing into the, you're in the frame of the pro -transgender ideology, even
using that term. And next, perhaps another, I think this legally is extremely significant, this next story we're going to cover. And it's also indicative of what I think might be a vibe shift. And it is the Varian Malpractice Verdict. So in January of this year, a jury in the New York Supreme Court in Westchester County. So The nomenclature is a little weird. In New York, the trial -level court is called the Supreme Court, so it's actually completely inverted.
So this was a trial -level court in Westchester County, which is just outside of New York City. The jury in Westchester County awarded Fox Varian, V -A -R -I -A -N. She is a 22 -year -old biological female. She was awarded $2 million in damages following a malpractice trial against Kenneth Einhorn and surgeon Dr. Simon Chen. And Varian had undergone a bilateral mastectomy. meaning both of her breasts were cut off at age 16 after
identifying as transgender. And then she later detransitioned and no longer identifies as transgender. There was a three -week civil trial. And so the legal basis for liability was the finding that the psychologist and the surgeon had departed from the standard of care. And so Einhorn, the psychiatrist, had written a referral letter. supporting the surgery in October 2019. And he had only started discussing the idea with Marion in March of that year, so six months previous.
And the letter contained numerous omissions and inaccuracies that left the surgeon without a clear picture of the patient's psychological history. The psychiatrist and the surgeon never communicated directly with each other. And there was evidence showing that Varian had told staff at the Albany Pride Center that she felt pressure to decide on a gender identity and she was afraid she might lose credibility if she raised doubts.
And I think that's a very valid concern because the – again, just dipping my toe very lightly as much as I can stand into the sort of transgender world, but specifically like the Reddit forums. The people who, the transgender people who detrans... detransition, they are treated with tremendous hatred and scorn. There is tremendous pressure once you sort of get involved in that world.
There's tremendous pressure, even if you start having second thoughts, there's a lot of pressure to suppress those misgivings you might have about going forward with the transition. And it's really a heartbreaking story. Woman Varian testified that upon seeing her post -surgical chest, she immediately felt something was wrong. And she felt searing, hot, ripping sensations across her chest and stated, quote, I felt shame. It's hard to face that you are disfigured for life.
Yes, religions always treat apostates more harshly than they do heathens. But I'm less sanguine about this shift than Jeff is. He kind of alluded to it in talking about the details. The way that I read it with my distinctly non -legal training is that it was, to use another cultural reference, It is like Dr. Hibbert trying to knock out Dr.
Nick. It's not that the underlying issues surrounding gender dysphoria and the way that it is now treated as something that should be affirmed rather than as a pathology were in any way fundamentally challenged. It was more, hey, this is a pretty lucrative thing we've got going on, and there's
a lot of cultural cachet. in being associated with it and so we need to make sure that we keep this clean and that we don't just let whoever come in here and sloppily make a mess of it by not Crossing the T's and dotting the I's and doing the due diligence and just trying to turn this into sort of like a mill where people are rubber stamped to have body parts chopped off. It's more that this thing is growing a little bit too cavalierly and without enough safeguards
and credentialism in place. And so we need to pare that back a little bit. And that's what this ruling represents. In fact, there were multiple people who are very much involved in these transgender surgeries who testified against the surgeon and the psychiatrist who were involved in effectively greenlighting something that shouldn't have been
greenlit so readily. But I think that it is premature to think that this signals some sort of seismic shift in the way that the medical establishment looks at gender bending procedures in the future. I think this is more a wake -up call to make sure that these things are a little cleaner and a little bit less grossly offensive to the public, but I don't think that it signals that there's any fundamental underlying change in the way that these things will be handled in the future.
Yes, that is an astute observation because this verdict in no way undermines or attacks the fundamental intellectual basis for transgender ideology it is just the specific application was incorrect but at the very least one would hope that the next psychiatrist who is considering recommending that a surgeon remove the breasts or the penis of a minor child will think twice about making that recommendation. And I think that's a good thing. Because I don't mean to overdose on black
pills. I think that anything that potentially has a chilling effect on green lighting these procedures is something that should be celebrated. I just am a little bit more cautious about what
it pretends for the future. And a major reason that I don't think that this is going to go away has to do with the Gallup data that we talked about previously it is generationally this is something that is becoming normalized quickly and so as these gen alpha and zoomers go from adolescence and teenagehood into young adults and then into professional positions, it is going to be something, again, in order of magnitude, more of them are going to identify as belonging
to these non -heteronormative groups. And so it is just going to be part of the broader culture that this is something that is. with us and something that needs to be accepted and celebrated and treated seriously. And so to think that all of that cultural buildup is going to be able to be overturned because there are some lawsuits against some overly eager or sloppy surgeons trying to make a quick buck by butchering people is maybe a little bit too much wishful thinking.
JK Rowling, the author of Harry Potter, responded to this verdict with the following. This will go down in history as one of the worst medical scandals of all time. Adults inside and outside the medical profession sold troubled young people like Varian the idea that all of their complex trauma would be resolved by removing healthy body parts. As more and more detransitioners arrive in court, the public will learn the full extent of the harm done to kids in the name of
an ideology. Clinicians performing these, quote, treatments will go down in history as barbarous activists who betrayed a sacred oath to do no harm. But we should never forget how many people outside the medical profession urged these young people on, gleefully assuring them that anyone
advising caution was an evil bigot. There are people in elitist professions like publishing and academia, not to mention politicians and celebrities with young fanbases, who did all they could to champion the idea of gender identity and kept pushing it even as the evidence of harm mounted. They're just as culpable as the clinicians. So obviously J .K. Rowling is interpreting and presenting this as a sea change. And of course, Ness maybe is more skeptical of that than she
is. I may be somewhere in the middle. So one more story I want to talk about is the case of Sage Blair. So she is a teenager from Appomattox County, Virginia, and she's approximately 18 or 19. I couldn't quite tell. And so she entered Appomattox County High School as a freshman in August 2021. And she had a bunch of issues. when she started school. Family dysfunctional family life issues. And so she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria around the time she began high school.
And then near the first day of school, she told a school counselor, Dina Olson, that she identified as a boy and wished to use male pronouns in the boy's restroom. And so apparently the counselor agreed to treat Sage as male at school while actively concealing this from Michelle, who is Sage's, I believe, biological. grandmother but adoptive mother. So she is or was Sage's legal
guardian. And so the school counselor concealed this from Michelle and used female pronouns when speaking with Michelle and male pronouns when speaking with Sage at school. And the school failed to inform Michelle of ongoing bullying and sexual harassment that Sage was experiencing from male classmates as a result of being directed to use the boys' restroom. Really horrifying story. Once Michelle, the child's guardian, discovered what was happening, Sage suffered a mental breakdown
and ran away from home. She ended up in Maryland and she was trafficked. And eventually she was subjected to sexual abuse and drugging. And then Sage ended up in front of Judge Robert Kershaw. in the city of Baltimore's juvenile division in September 2021. And Sage was given a court -appointed public defender who represented to the court that Sage had reported emotional and physical abuse by her parents, that her parents were unsupportive of her gender identity, and
that she felt unsafe at home. So there's more details we could go into, but bottom line is Sage was placed in an all boys residential facility and she was abused there again. She ran away. She ended up in Texas and eventually was recovered by law enforcement. She eventually returned to Virginia and apparently now, thankfully, is doing better. And she is going to Liberty University on a full scholarship. So this case came to my
attention because President Trump. invited sage to the state of the union address on february 24th and um so he invited sage and michelle blair uh as special guests and he devoted a significant portion of his remarks to their case and here is one more opportunity to show common sense in government in the gallery tonight are sage blair and her mother michelle In 2021, Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating
her as a boy and hiding it from her parents. Hard to believe, isn't it? Before long, a confused Sage ran away from home after she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland. A left wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because. they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son. Sage was thrown into an all -boys state home and suffered terribly for a long time.
But today, all of that is behind them because Sage is a proud and wonderful young woman with a full -ride scholarship to Liberty University. Sage and Michelle, please stand up. Thank you for your great bravery. And who can believe that we're even speaking about things like this? 15 years ago, if somebody was up here and said that, they'd say, what's wrong with him? But now we have to say it because it's going on all over numerous states without even telling the parents.
But surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents' arms and transition them. to a new gender against the parents' will. Who would believe that we've been talking about this? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately. Look, nobody stands up. These people are crazy, I'm telling you. They're crazy. Boy, oh, boy. We're lucky we have a country. With people like this, Democrats are destroying our country, but we've stopped it just in the
nick of time, didn't we? There's just audio that you're being subjected to, but what Trump is referring to is all the Republicans standing up and clapping for what he's saying, but the Democrats sitting on their hands and refusing to clap for what is ostensibly the success story of this woman who was going down a dark path and had been abused and now has gotten her life back together. And to tie that into J .K. Rowling's
triumphalism about the court case ruling. If the transgenderism nonsense is culturally overturned, it will be in no small part on account of the fact that this is something that is more harmful, far more harmful for women than it is for men, not just with regards to sports and how men entering female sports destroys female sports, whereas women pretending to be men entering men's sports
never comes up. Because if it did, it wouldn't mean anything other than that woman pretending to be a boy succeeding even less in the boy sport than she did in the girls version of the sport.
And it's not just because adolescent boys can transition to a simulation that more closely resembles a woman than girls can transition into something that... looks or passes as an adult man, but also because when it comes to the gender bending, in the case of this girl who was put in an all boys group home and was, of course, sexually abused, probably almost continuously, that is not at all the case when the gender bending is swapped if it is a male inmate for example
being thrown in with other women because he claims that he is a woman well in that case too it's the biological women who suffer so it's always in every iteration of this it's always the biological women who suffer not the biological men at least not to nearly the same extent and so the overturning of the ascendancy of transgenderism could be a consequence still of the broader liberal framework of the oppression olympics and the like where some group namely women who used to be able to
enjoy predominance over men in that social hierarchy have now been supplanted by transgender men pretending to be women who have now found a way to hack the system and put themselves at the top. And so, while it is definitely worth celebrating any dethroning of the transgender nonsense, I think it might be premature to celebrate that.
I think it's also premature to think that this signals some sort of broader social reconfiguration to... biological realities at a more fundamental level I think this is instead more of feminist feeling that they were edged out by overly aggressive men trying to pretend to be women and so they are reasserting the feminist paradigm though we're talking about these shifting cultural affinities and predilections. One thing that is clear from this clip that Jeff shared is that Trump has
not changed at all. It is a familiar description to hear him described as a 1980s Democrat, and that really is what he is. He is the living,
breathing embodiment of X movements. passing me by not me changing and so that is a bit of a black pill to think that someone who would be characterized as on the moderate left hasn't changed at all and now he is regularly characterized as some sort of hard right authoritarian fascist even though from the way he speaks to the way he dresses to his cultural Sensibilities have remained completely unchanged over the last 50,
60 years. I don't know who controls the camera in these State of the Union addresses, so who controls what somebody watching from home actually sees, whether they zoom in to Trump or pan out or zoom in on somebody in the audience. But I've noticed it seems like it's one consistent set of video and audio that... that is blasted out on all platforms, whether it's C -SPAN or CNN or Fox News. So during that speech, at one point, it zooms in on Sarah McBride, a congressman from
Delaware. He is the first openly transgender person elected to Congress. He is biologically male, presents himself as a woman. And unlike McBride and very much like Trump, we will strive for that same consistency in thanking you for listening and signing off, talking to you next week.