Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello everyone. And welcome to the 86th episode of the Atlas society asks. My name is Jennifer Anji Grossman. My friends know me as JAG. I'm the CEO of the Atlas society. We are the leading nonprofit organization, introducing young people to the ideas of Iran in fun, creative ways like graphic novels, animated videos, and yeah, somebody even sometimes dresses up as I'm Rand. Today, we are joined by Kara Dansky author of the abolition of sex. Before I even get into introducing our guest. I want to remind all of you that we will be taking questions. If you are joining us on zoom on Facebook, on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, uh, you know what to do, just type in the question to the comments, please make them short and we'll try to get to as many of them as we can. Now, if you're anything like me, you may have noticed, uh, for the past couple of years, at least, you know, as long as I've been paying attention, a, um, increasing focus, uh, on the subject of gender, uh, whether it's with the proliferation of preferred pronouns, uh, the accusations of transphobia against people as a prominent is J K Rowling.
Speaker 0 00:01:26 Um, and even recently, uh, male athletes winning honors in, in female sports. So here today to help us, uh, make some sense out of all of this is our guest Kara Deskie. She is a feminist and attorney with a 20 year background in criminal law and criminal justice policy. She serves as the chair of the committee on law and legislation of the global women's human rights campaign and president of the us chapter. But most recently she's the author of the abolition of sex, how the transgender gender harms women and girls. Kara, welcome again. And thanks for joining us. Thanks so much
Speaker 1 00:02:13 For having me, I should say quickly. And I should've told you this before. I apologize. As of January, the women's human rights campaign is now known as women's declaration international. Our aims are absolutely the same nothing's changed except that their names.
Speaker 0 00:02:26 Okay, great. Wonderful. And we'll get those links and we'll put them in our chat so that our viewers can check it out. So, um, honestly, Kara, before reading your book, I have to admit that, uh, my understanding of what transgender actually means was, um, uh, a bit murky and perhaps many of our viewers, uh, are still uncertain as to what we mean when we hear the terms, transgender man, or woman. So, uh, how do we, how are we to understand those words?
Speaker 1 00:03:05 Thanks for the question. I understand it can be very confusing, especially when these words are often used throughout the media and throughout society seemingly on the assumption that we all know what they mean they're rarely defined. So I will say I do not use that language ever. If I'm speaking about men and boys, I will simply say men and boys, if I'm speaking about women and girls, I will simply say women and girls by that, I mean human female people, and your viewers probably can't see on the cover of the book, the word transgender is in quotes. And I always do that when I use that language, because I try to make the case specifically in chapter five of the book that transgender was simply invented. And the reason it was invented is that it comes from a movement to obscure the reality of biological sex.
Speaker 1 00:04:06 However, if a bunch of people who wanted to obscure the reality of biological sex simply tried to sell Americans on the notion that biological sex doesn't exist. I contend that that wouldn't work and they needed a word to do that. And that magic word is transgender. I don't also maybe ask sometimes when I'm having this conversation, I like to ask the question. If someone asks me, for example, Kara, what are we going to do about the problem of transgender athletes in women's sports? I have some ideas and solutions to that, but I often will step back and ask the person, well, when you say transgender athletes, what do you mean? And more often than not, they'll sort of pause and think, and I will ask when you say that, do you mean men and boys? And often they'll say yes. Sometimes they'll look a little bit concerned as though they're not allowed to say that.
Speaker 1 00:05:15 And I just say very clearly if we mean men and boys, it's okay to just say men and boys, it's really important to speak accurately and truthfully, and I understand that almost all Americans, all of us are under a tremendous amount of social pressure to capitulate, to this movement, to obscure the reality of biological sex. The social pressure is stronger, and I would argue more coercive than any movement that I've certainly seen in my lifetime. So I understand it. I understand the use of inaccurate language that obscures the reality of biological sex. And I'm here to encourage everyone to resist that and to speak accurately, to speak truthfully at all times.
Speaker 0 00:06:02 Yes. So because when I was first hearing this term, transgender woman, I, I flipped it on its head. I thought, oh, it's, it's a woman who says that she's a man. Or when I heard transgender, man, it was a man who said the things that she's a woman, but actually when we hear these terms, at least a transgender woman is a man who says he's a woman and is changing, you know, may or not be changing his body to, uh, to present as a woman and vice versa. A transgender man is a woman or a girl who is saying or bleeding that she's man. And then, um, either presenting as a Manor or possibly changing her body to present as a man. So that was just kind of where I was trying to clear up, you know, what, what was even meant when we were talking about it.
Speaker 0 00:07:04 But I, what you say really resonates with me as we were just talking before the break, um, for all of those buying Rams fans who are, are watching Iran was very precise about language and believed, you know, her whole philosophy was summed up in the identity principle a is a, and I, I, you could see that expressed in, um, her dystopian Nadella Anthem in which, uh, it's about a culture in which the word I has been abolished and how just even not having access to that word, um, shapes. And contorts our thinking. So, um, but getting back to the book, as you mentioned, the, uh, the subtitle, how transgender, the transgender agenda harms women and girls, again, you know, this is a pretty uninitiated audience. Um, you talked about, uh, wanting to obscure biological differences. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on that agenda for our list?
Speaker 1 00:08:08 Sure. And I also just want to refer back to something that you alluded to, which is that some people who refer to themselves as transgender do go on a lifetime's worth of hormones and frequently have life altering surgeries to what is called affirm their delusion about their actual sex. We're also seeing increasingly in the United States and elsewhere that it's becoming increasingly socially acceptable to simply identify as transgender solely on the basis of a person's say so. And a lot of people don't understand that the latest statistic that I read is that approximately 80% of people who claim to identify as transgender, do not get any hormonal or surgical interventions at all. It's simply based on a self declaration of being a member of the opposite sex. So I just want to highlight that.
Speaker 0 00:09:10 No, I think that's important and we're going to get into it a little bit later because again, hearing reports of, um, condoms being handed out in women's prisons, and well, there are transgender men and we would maybe just assume they've had certain parts removed or whatever, but, you know, somebody could simply, uh, say that they are a transgender woman. They're a male, their body is male and they're in a women's facility. And that obviously is, is causing issues. So again,
Speaker 1 00:09:49 Yeah. So to go back to the, to the question, that's a great segue because most Americans have no idea that there are men being housed in women's prisons today. So for example, there's a man who refers to himself as a trans woman. He was convicted of raping a 12 year old girl. That's what got him in prison. And he's being housed in a women's prison in Washington state. There's another man who was convicted of murdering 12 prostituted women. And he's also being held in the women's prison in Washington state. I believe there are seven other examples, those two, perhaps being some of the most egregious in Washington state. And there are countless examples in California. It's not limited to California and Washington state though. There are policies in place I believe in 49 states. Plus the district of Columbia that permit men to be housed in women's prisons and jails, according to some criteria.
Speaker 1 00:10:55 And that varies state by state. And we probably don't have time to get into all of it. But the point is there's some variation between states that determines the criteria that a man must satisfy in order to be housed in a women's prison. But the policies exist in 49 states plus DC that's happening today. And most Americans have no idea that that's true because the media, for the most part refuses to report on it. But I'm saying, I know we're going to talk about that, but I'm saying that now, because you asked the question, what do I mean by how this agenda harms women and girls? One of the ways in which it harms women and girls is what I refer to as the invasion of women's spaces prisons are. But when example, you also mentioned sports, there's a man swimming on the women's swim team at the university of Pennsylvania, and he's allowed to do that under NCAA rules because he has been on testosterone suppression medication for one year, which is extremely insulting to the women to suggest that a man simply becomes a woman after he suppresses testosterone for a year, women are not simply a version of men with lower testosterone.
Speaker 1 00:12:15 We're actually whole complete human beings. Um, so the invasion of women's prisons, I talk in my book about domestic violence shelters. There are domestic violence shelters that are supposed to be only for women where the domestic violence shelter can get in trouble for excluding a man. If a man wants to be housed there on the basis that he is a transgender woman. And of course, in domestic violence shelters, these are overwhelmingly women who are fleeing abusive relationships with violent men who do not wish to share spaces with violent men or any men. So prisons, sports, domestic violence shelters, and really to a certain extent, many public accommodations. So, um, I know we're going to get into the equality act and the Biden administration a little bit later, but I'll just give as an example, something that happened in California in Los Angeles this past summer, California has a law on the books that says that places of public accommodation are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of anyone's gender identity.
Speaker 1 00:13:22 One practical implication of this is that this past summer a man was permitted to be in the nude section of a women's spa on the basis that he claimed to identify as a woman, the, a woman complained because there were nine year old girls present where this naked man was walking around the nude section of the women's spa and the women complained. And the spa's response was, well, we can't discriminate against this person because the person has a female gender identity. And the woman was quite appalled at that. And rightly so, except for the fact that the spa was not wrong, the Spall was probably in compliance with California state law. So those are some of the ways in which the, what I refer to as the redefinition of sex to mean gender identity is having very practical implications for the rights, privacy and safety of women and girls. None of this is theoretical. None of it is hypothetical. It is all happening right now.
Speaker 0 00:14:25 Uh, just as an aside, like, does somebody have to present a card? You know, do they get a medical certificate? I mean, like people that have their, uh, service dogs or, or what have you, I dunno, just this shocking to me that somebody can just say, Hey, on I'm a woman. I know I don't look like one, but, um, anyway, so again, um, Carol, one of the misconceptions, they big misconceptions, uh, about the, on my part about the topic, um, was the assumption that trans gender critics like you and Abigail Shrier, uh, were coming from, uh, from a socially conservative, um, perspective, um, brace yourself kind of a tradition of, uh, Phyllis Schlafly. Obviously now having read your book and familiarize myself with your work. I know nothing could be further from the truth. So why don't you just share with us a little bit about your background and why you as a feminist, uh, came to believe that this issue was, was so important?
Speaker 1 00:15:45 Sure, thanks. I I've always been a lifelong Democrat since I registered at 18, except for a very brief period of time when I was a member of the green party. And I had a 20 year career, as you said, in criminal law and criminal justice, I graduated from law school. I became a public defender. I worked for various progressive nonprofit organizations doing various criminal justice related advocacy, including from 2012 to 2014, the American civil liberties union, where I worked on the movement to end mass incarceration and the campaign to end police militarization. I did a few more things in the realm of criminal law and criminal justice. And then in 2014, a very good friend woke me up to the really serious dangers that the whole transgender movement or so-called gender identity presents to women and girls. And just how anti-feminist it is. I should say, even though I've, I did criminal justice work for 20 years, I've always considered myself a feminist.
Speaker 1 00:16:52 Uh, during college, I did abortion clinic defense during law school. I volunteered at NARAL. Um, so I've always considered myself the far left feminist. And so starting at the end of 2014, I started to really understand this issue. In 2015, I joined the radical feminist organization. Women's liberation front in 2016. I joined its board and from 2016 to 2020, I've worked very hard in a volunteer capacity, uh, to, to work, to secure the rights, privacy and safety of women and girls in the law. And as I became increasingly, well-known for doing that work, it became increasingly more difficult to, to work in the so-called progressive criminal justice reform movement in the U S because what I have to say on this topic is not appreciated, um, for the most part on the left, although I'll say something more that, so, uh, I resigned from the Wolf board in 2020, I remain a member of that organization.
Speaker 1 00:17:55 And since then I have been actively involved in the global movement to, uh, to defend women's sex-based rights, as we said, uh, in various capacities in connection with women's declaration international. One of the things that is so interesting about this whole discussion is I completely understand why you would have made the assumption that opposition to gender ideology is all coming from the political, right. And the reason that you would think that reasonably is that that is how the media always frames it always. But what so many people don't know is that there are millions of leftists, feminists, gay rights, activists, evolutionary biologists, who are more than happy to stand here and say, I will take a stand from the material reality of biological sex. I will defend the rights of women and girls. Again, all of these people coming from the left, but the media won't talk about it. The media will not platform us.
Speaker 0 00:18:57 Hmm. Well, uh, you, you were talking about people that are from the gay and lesbian community. Um, and that was another reason. I was a little hesitant to prioritize this, um, because at the outlet society, you know, we have a strong commitment to every individuals, um, equality before the law. We have, uh, gays and lesbians on our staff, on faculty. And, um, again, you know, not being terribly sophisticated about the subject, I just see the LGBTQ, uh, acronym. And it's the common shorthand to describe, um, those with different, uh, sexual orientations. Uh, but your contention is that, uh, sexual orientation and gender identity are, have nothing to do with one another. Um, and that sort of the more redefining the word sex to include gender identity is in fact, anti gay and lesbian. So how so?
Speaker 1 00:20:06 Very much so, and it was really a brilliant strategy to get the T in the cue attached to the LG and B. Um, th the specific answer to your question is that sexual orientation is fundamentally about sexual attraction to other. So some of us are women attracted to women. Some of us are gay men attracted to men. Some of us are women or men attracted to members of both sexes. And some of us are women or men attracted solely to members of the opposite sex, whatever the category into which we fit. All of that is fundamentally about attraction to other T and the other letters refer to one's own internal sense. It has nothing to do with attraction to other. So it is a fundamentally different thing. And I think that most Americans don't understand that. At one point I was having a conversation with a man who runs a very conservative, uh, Christian religious organization. And I told him that the majority of people who identify as transgender are straight men, and he looked shocked, he, he couldn't understand what I was saying, but it's true. The majority of people who claim to have a transgender identity are straight men who are attracted to women. So we're really not dealing with a sexual minority here at all, or anything having to do with sexual attraction to others. And I, I work with so many women all over the world. Uh, I work with some gay men too, but, but especially lesbians all over
Speaker 0 00:21:49 The world who are just appalled at what is going on. These are women who are exclusively attracted to women, and they fought hard for their right to be allowed to be. Same-sex attracted. It's hard for gay men, for sure, but lesbians have it doubly hard because in addition to being same-sex attracted they're women. And so that brings everything that is difficult about being a woman in this society. I've heard from so many lesbians who tell me that they feel pressure to date trans women on the basis that they're women. But again, the people who fall into the category, trans women, according to how that word is used, colloquially are men and lesbians by definition are not attracted to men. And shouldn't be compelled to be, I hear the same arguments from gay men, I should say. Um, and I'm not trying to exclude gay men by any stretch.
Speaker 0 00:22:42 It's just that my organization fights for the rights, privacy and safety of women and girls, and that very much includes lesbians and bisexual women. Okay. Uh, well, I'm really glad we're clearing up this confusion because as we can see, it can be quite, um, baffling. So, uh, there seems to be two main areas of concern with regard to the transgender movement. One is the dramatic rise in, uh, young girls and adolescents who decide that they are transgender and, and, uh, often embark on regimens of hormones and surgeries. And then the other is legal developments, which allow biological males access to women's sports and a range of women's facilities. As we, uh, discuss from restrooms to prisons to shelter, the third might be the degradation in public discourse in which disagreement with the transgender ideology is not permitted. Uh, your book primarily is about the aspect of the transgender agenda, which involves men claiming to be women you've described, um, the gender identity movement as left wing misogyny on start steroids, and even call it a men's rights movement intended to objectify women's bodies. So again, help us understand.
Speaker 1 00:24:09 So the movement to obliterate sex unquestionably is coming from the political left. And as I said, it's a very top down top heavy movement. I know we'll talk in a little bit about what the Biden administration is doing on this front, but fundamentally this is about sexual objectification. And I try to make the case in chapter five of my book, that it's actually the ultimate in sexual objectification, because it's suggesting that that human beings are nothing other than a series of body parts. And I have come to think that that is absolutely true. I am gravely concerned about the degradation of discourse in society and our inability to talk about these things. In most media outlets. I was talking with someone earlier today and just noticing that it has become impossible to say the words women are female on the pages of the New York times.
Speaker 1 00:25:08 There's something extremely, extremely upsetting about that. I will say one word about the phenomenon of young women being referred to so-called gender clinics. It's really heartbreaking, um, to me, and to many people that these young women who are coming into their bodies, coming into their sexuality as young adults and navigating what is already a very difficult situation. It's very difficult for young women to start developing and have the experience of how they're viewed as sexualized beings in society. And so many women are uncomfortable with that quite understandably. And today's society is telling these young women that if they're uncomfortable with that, maybe they should just become a boy. And we're seeing skyrocketing numbers of young women who are going on puberty blockers at young ages, going on cross-sex hormones. It's slightly older ages getting medically unnecessary, double mastectomies and medically unnecessary hysterectomies and young people whose brains are not fully formed, are making the lifelong decision to permanently alter their bodies and to permanently sterilize themselves. And it's, it's just appalling to me that, that we're allowing that we don't let young people drink drive, smoke, vote until certain ages, because we understand that young people's brains are not fully developed and that they're not, we don't want to trust them to make those kinds of decisions at different ages. So why are we letting young people make the decision to permanently sterilize themselves?
Speaker 0 00:26:54 All right, we have a ton of questions from our audience, which we're going to get to. We have another 30 minutes or so of our total interview. Uh, so I, I did want to get to a couple of these things before we turn to our audience questions. Um, one of course is because we are a philosophy organization in your book, you trace the evolution of the current gender ideology back to so-called queer theory. And even further back to postmodernism at the Atlas society, spend a good deal of time, uh, criticizing postmodernism in particular, its rejection of objectivity and the manipulation of language. So what is queer theory and how did it pave the way for transgenderism?
Speaker 1 00:27:39 So queer theory definitely came out of postmodernism and it is fundamentally, there's still a lot to say about it, but fundamentally it boils down to the idea that the notion that sex is a spectrum, they talk a lot about clearing the binary. So the idea here is that that oppression based on sex, isn't the problem. The problem is oppression based on the existence of a sex binary, that is really fundamentally anti-feminist first of all. And it's also just fundamentally anti reality, but that's what it says. And so when someone talks about queering, the sex binary, what they're doing is they are manipulating their audience into somehow believing that because they're because they have a fancy degree behind their name. They somehow have some authority to persuade people to believe something that we know that we know in the core of our B is not true.
Speaker 0 00:28:41 Okay. So we had referenced this earlier, what's happening on the legislative front. You write about this so-called equality act, which passed Congress in February of this past year. Uh, and the Senate judiciary committee in March, what is it? And what are the ramifications if it is signed into law?
Speaker 1 00:29:04 So it was initially introduced in 2015 and it's been reintroduced a couple of times since then. It was the last time reintroduced, I believe last year. And yes, you're right. It passed in the house. And in the Senate judiciary committee and Senate majority leader Schumer has had the ability to bring the legislation to the floor since March of 2021 and has not done. So what it would do is it would take numerous provisions of United States, civil rights law, including the 1964 civil rights act and redefine sex for all purposes to include so-called gender identity. Now, I just want to say the, the public accommodations provision of the 1964 civil rights act was enacted to end the scourge of legal racial segregation under Jim Crow, where most of us alive today have no personal recollection of it. I certainly don't, but I'm very aware of what was going on, where we had separate bathrooms that were segregated by race, water, fountains, lunch counters, we're familiar with the history and the passage of the 1964 civil rights act was a massive victory for the civil rights movement to end the scourge of racial segregation and for, for my party leadership to now take that and redefine the word sex to include so-called gender identity.
Speaker 1 00:30:34 I think it's just a massive insult to the civil rights leaders who were successful in getting that initial law passed. What it would do is open up all places of public accommodation, all across the United States of America to allow for any man who claims to identify as a woman access to any space that is designated for women. So if a man wants to walk into a hotel and visit the women's restroom in the lobby, he can do that. And if the hotel staff throw him out, he can complain that he was discriminated against on the basis of his female. Gender identity, same goes for movie theaters, restaurants, bars, clubs, pretty much every business. You can imagine, no space designated for women and girls will be safe. And I have personal experience with this, even without enactment of the equality act. There's a law in place in Washington, DC, where I live that is very similar to what the equality act would do.
Speaker 1 00:31:40 And I have had the experience of walking into a public restroom in a restaurant, and there was a man in there wearing a dress and makeup. And I just, I, I want everyone to understand the consequences of this could not be more dire. They really could not be more dire. I don't want to speculate on why the majority leader did not bring the legislation to the floor of the Senate. Last year. I will say that my organization, um, one of our, one of the members of our leadership is a constituent of Senator Schumer. She lives in upstate New York, and she was able to secure a meeting with one of his key staff members. And we met and it happened to be the case. Our organization is non-partisan. We are Democrats, Republicans, independents, and greens, but it happened to be the case that all of those of us who attended that meeting were Democrats.
Speaker 1 00:32:28 And we said as much to the staffer, and we explained our concerns about the equality act. And subsequently we wrote a letter to majority Schumer and we got it signed by over 1500 women all over the world, explaining why passage of the equality act would be a disaster, not only for us women and girls, but for women and girls all over the world. And I don't know, and we submitted that directly to his staff. We didn't just send it off to a generic email address. I don't know if that had any impact on his thinking. I'd like to think it did, but, um, I'm, I'm happy to report that the equality act did not pass in the us Senate in 2021. I'm 100% certain that if it does president Biden will sign it. There's no doubt about that. He's made that very clear.
Speaker 0 00:33:17 So, yeah. So let's get to, uh, to Biden. Um, you have said that his administration has been steadily meticulously and viciously obliterating sex through federal administrative law, uh, since the moment that he took office a year ago. So what are some examples of that?
Speaker 1 00:33:36 Literally the day he took office, he signed executive order 1, 3, 9, 8, 8 called preventing, paraphrasing, preventing discrimination on the basis of sexual gender, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation throughout federal administrative law. To be very clear. My organization is not at all concerned about protecting sexual orientation in federal law, administratively or legislatively. We are very much in favor of protections for lesbian gay and bisexual people. Our concern is with gender identity because it represents the complete obliteration of sex and eliminates important distinctions between men and women. So I just wanted to say that on the very first day he was in office, he signed executive order 1, 3, 9, 8, 8, and then over a period of about six months, the Biden administration put out a series of memos and orders, including the department of health and human services, the department of housing and urban development. Um, the department of education, essentially obliterating biological sex in federal administrative law.
Speaker 1 00:34:47 The memo that was put out by the department of education essentially announces an end to title IX. Of course it doesn't use those words, but that's what it is effectively. That's what it is. The memo that came out of the department of health and human services essentially says that in any healthcare facility that receives funding under the affordable care act, those facilities are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of so-called gender identity. What this means effectively is that if a woman is seeking gynecological care or any care, but I'm using gynecological care for obvious reasons in a health care facility that is funded under the ACA. If that facility provides her with a male health care provider who claims to identify as female, there's nothing she can do about it under the department of housing and urban development, which oversees housing rules that govern virtually all housing in the United States, according to language on its own website, uh, entities that receive funding are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of so-called gender identity.
Speaker 1 00:35:57 This includes domestic violence shelters that receive federal funding, college dormitories that receive federal funding. Any, any housing that is designated as single sex is no longer permitted under the administration to discriminate on the basis of so-called gender identity. I just want to say quickly, there's a lawsuit that is pending. It was filed in federal court, in the Eastern district of Tennessee to challenge all of these orders. And that's a very good thing. And I'm proud to say that my organization filed a friend of the court brief in support of the states that are challenging the administration's executive orders.
Speaker 0 00:36:33 We are going to get to some of these questions, and I want to encourage those who are watching us on our various platforms, uh, sending your questions. This is a very unique opportunity to talk to Kara Dansby author of the abolition of sex. Uh, okay. We have a question here from Scott Schiff asking, have liberals tried to cancel you online or call your group a hate group,
Speaker 1 00:37:01 Uh, to the ladder? Yes, absolutely. Um, our group is routinely referred to as a hate group, um, especially overseas in the UK and in Europe. Um, we are, we're very frequently referred to as, as a hate group. Yes. Um, using that exact language personally, um, I've taken hits for this in my professional career. Have people gone after me online? Not too much, cause I'm not quite famous enough for that, but thanks for the question.
Speaker 0 00:37:31 Okay. Um, we have a question from YouTube guardian gamer asks Kara, what would you say about the statements? Many trans say that if you don't accept them, you are denying their rights and existence.
Speaker 1 00:37:47 So to be perfectly clear, no one who makes the kinds of arguments that I make in my book is to denying anyone's existence at all. We all exist all eight or so billion of us. We exist the contention instead is that all of us are either female or male that did not, is not to deny anyone's existence or anyone's humanity at all. So the, the claim is just specious on its face. I think, um, I forget the earlier part of that question.
Speaker 0 00:38:17 Uh, yeah. Yeah. She was just asking whether or not, um, uh, those, those, I mean, maybe elaborate on what other kinds of, um, arguments are employed by the trans community to say, uh, you're denying their humanity. You're encouraging, uh, suicide, right? That's, that's one, I've heard that, um, if, if people aren't encouraged or affirmed in their identity that it's harmful to them.
Speaker 1 00:38:50 So, so the first of all, the suicide statistic is manipulated. Um, it is simply not true that individuals who choose to go down a path of so-called transition reduce their likelihood of suicide. In fact, suicidality remains the same after so-called transition. But to your point about arguments that are put forth. The interesting thing is that there really aren't ever arguments that are put forth as the, the previous question or kind of alluded to people who make these kinds of arguments are simply called names. If you come from the Christian right wing, you are immediately labeled a right wing bigot. If you make arguments like this, if you're someone like me, you're immediately labeled a turf, we can get into what that means if you'd like, um, do you
Speaker 0 00:39:44 Have some questions about that? So,
Speaker 1 00:39:46 Okay. Oh, we'll hold off on that. Um, so, but there aren't really any credible arguments put forth to counteract the, the argument that women and girls deserve legal protections on the basis of our sex. Instead, it's sort of empty threats and name calling and in the media it's it's assumptions. So, as we were talking about earlier, media reports will routinely use words like trans girls, trans women, trans athletes, trans students, without ever explaining what they mean by that. It is just assumed that we're all supposed to simply accept it. So there really aren't ever any coherent arguments put forth, it's all innuendo threats and name-calling, and if there were legitimate arguments to dispute what I'm saying, they wouldn't need to cancel us.
Speaker 0 00:40:46 Right. I think sometimes those who are the most and most hostile and, um, assaulting, you know, it just reveals that they, they don't have a solid arguments on their side to, um, to win a debate. So, uh, Bruce majors has a question asking, uh, he's saying that he finds a suicide topic, um, intriguing. And in his experience, it seemed that, uh, now that we have this LGBTQ that's the suicide among, um, young people seems to be growing. Of course, there's a lot of, uh, factors that play into it. And, you know, seeing a rise in suicide, um, during these, these quarantines and, um, lockdowns. But, um, his question is, is his ideology that tells kids gender is fluid. Uh, is, is that contributing to, um, psychological harm among children possibly to suicidal ideation?
Speaker 1 00:41:51 I can't speak to this specific question of psychological harm because I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I can say this. I have become absolutely convinced that if a child is sincerely confused about her or his sex, the unquestionably, most compassionate thing we can do for such a child is to encourage the child or young person to accept themselves as who they are. I tell the story in my book about how, when I was 18, I became anorexic. My parents, I was, I was sincerely confused about an aspect of my body. That confusion was sincere, and I suffered a lot. My parents did the kindest thing possible, which was helped me out of my delusion. And the most compassionate thing we can do for these young people is to help them out of their delusion. All these girls, all these boys who have a sincere confusion about what's going on, the most compassionate thing is to be kind and help them come to accept themselves just as they are.
Speaker 1 00:42:57 I will also just add, yes, there is a disturbing amount of complete junk science being taught in our schools at all levels down to the kindergarten level. I've read a kindergarten curriculum that teaches five-year-olds that some girls are actually boys and some boys are actually girls and you can be whatever you want. And I suspect that as that continues, we are going to see heartbreakingly, even more numbers of young girls and boys who have a sincere confusion are going to be referred to a so-called gender clinic and are going to be put on lifelong hormones and be subjected to life altering surgeries. And I'm sorry, I get a little emotional when I talk about that aspect. Um, it's just horrifying.
Speaker 0 00:43:46 So getting back to terms, we, you mentioned turf, we've got questions about that, uh, in your, in your, uh, introduction here, the transgender delusion, uh, observations of a turf. So what is a turf?
Speaker 1 00:44:05 So the term turf was initially created by misogynists who don't want women to speak up for ourselves. It stands or is said to stand for trans exclusionary, radical feminist. And it's an insult that's hurled at people like me, people like JK Rowling. I don't want to put myself in the same category as JK Rowling. That was so obnoxious. Um, but no, I mean, it is an insult that is hurled at women who stand up for our rights, privacy and safety. And an interesting thing happened last fall, where a comedian Dave Chappelle had a Netflix special on called the closer. You can find it on Netflix and about three quarters of the way through, he starts talking about this topic. And at one point he defends JK Rowling and he announces that he's team turf. So a lot of feminists have just taken it back. So rather than, rather than acknowledge the notion of a trans exclusionary radical feminist, we say things like tired of explaining reality to fools. Totally excellent, radical feminist. So we're trying to have some fun with it. And, um, it's, I also just want to say that it's an accurate, so the term trans exclusionary is just wrong because radical feminists, uh, include women who claim to identify as men or identify as trans as women. So it's not as though radical feminists are excluding anyone who claims to identify as transgender. The category of people that we would like to exclude from our intimate spaces is men and boys.
Speaker 0 00:45:52 Well, Kara, I just want to let you know, reading our comments screen here. You are getting a lot of, uh, kudos, um, people saying that you're very brave for speaking out. And so you've won a few converts and admirers. Um, again, another term that, that we hear is this issue of gender dysphoria. Where does that fit in with the whole, um, trans gender? I mean, it's, that's been something that's been studied for a while, right?
Speaker 1 00:46:28 It's in the DSM, the, um, the diagnosis and statistics manual that contains psychological diagnoses than others. So it's in the DSM as a diagnosis that someone can be given. And if I understand correctly, the, the, the thrust of it is that a person who is said to have a sincere belief, that the person is what people will say is the opposite. Gender has gender dysphoria. I take a little bit of issue with the term gender dysphoria, because if there are people who are sincerely confused about their sex, I would say that that is sex dysphoria. It's not gender dysphoria, a whole part of the problem that we haven't even really gotten into is the interchangeability of those terms. And the use, the widespread use of the term gender, when, what the person actually means is sex. So I, again, I'm not a psychologist, so I can't speak to the details of a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. I, I don't like it for political reasons, because if it does mean a person who was sincerely confused about their sex than it should be sex dysphoria. Hm.
Speaker 0 00:47:39 Okay. Interesting. Um, I am going to probably save the question for last, which is, uh, your concerns as a Democrat about the prospects of the democratic party and, uh, your belief that this whole agenda is, um, actually weakening the democratic party's electoral prospects, but we have a few others that are coming in here that are interesting. Um, Vance Mayberry, who's watching us on Facebook. Uh, I think it asks a fair question, which is, is it okay for men and boys to exclude women from their spaces? Do you think the boy Scouts should have, uh, stood firm and, uh, say, you know, we have the boy Scouts, you can have girl Scouts, but we're not going to be, um, admitting other, other, uh, sex, uh, other genders to our, to our group.
Speaker 1 00:48:40 So I think what you meant it was where the proposal is like, should we have kept boy Scouts and girl Scouts and not allow Scouts to self identify as members of the opposite sex. Right. That was okay. Um, I do. I also think it's a fair question about organizations like Scouts. I think when it comes to the general question of whether it's okay for men and boys to exclude women and girls, we have to take a, both a historical approach and a practical approach. So historically there have been spaces that were reserved for men and boys, golf clubs, dinner clubs, things like that, that excluded women and girls. And the reason that they did that was not for the safety of the men and boys in question, the reason was to keep men and boys in positions of power and women and girls at home.
Speaker 1 00:49:29 So that was very much a deliberate strategy to maintain a system where men are on top in society and women are kept in a position of subservience. What we're talking about here is something very different. We're talking about the rights of women and girls to be in intimate spaces, um, where I'm just going to say, know, we might be menstruating. Uh, I heard a story the other day of a woman who knew she was having a miscarriage and she ran into a women's room where she did have a miscarriage. None of us want to be having any of that with men and boys present. And we also have to acknowledge the reality that male violence against women is a really serious problem. We know from the statistics that 98% of rapes are committed by men, against women in this country, by definition, in many other countries, a rape by definition can only be committed by a man.
Speaker 1 00:50:20 We don't have that situation here. Um, and we know that, you know, 80 to 90% of robberies, aggravated assaults, murders are committed by men. Many of them, not all, but many of them against women. And that's just a, that's just a reality. That's not a particularly feminist position. That's just true. And so women, for the most part don't want men in places like our bathrooms or locker rooms or changing rooms, because w we are necessarily statistically potential victims of male violence just by virtue of being. We definitely, I would maintain have the right to exclude males from intimate spaces for that reason. And I think that's a very different thing from men being able to exclude women from things like dinner clubs. I do think that you raise a very interesting point on the scout question and whether there should just be Scouts as opposed to boy Scouts and girl Scouts.
Speaker 1 00:51:18 I think there's value in segregating that bisects. I was a girl scout. I think there's value in women and girls spending time alone with only women and girls. I will also tell you that there's an equivalent to the roughly equivalent to the girl Scouts in the UK called the girl guides, very similar organization. They opened up their ranks to men and boys who claim to be women and girls. And they had an incident where a man was permitted to be a leader in the girl guides on the basis of his female gender identity that I don't think is okay at all.
Speaker 0 00:51:51 This is more of a, a comment than a question that I wanted to share it anyway. Um, Darien, Valcom saying, Kara is the best. She doesn't use this word, but I Darian called this agenda, terrorism, misogynistic, terrorism of women. Uh, I was terrorized in its name by a man twice my size who threatened to do something that could have gotten me killed this agenda is absolutely a threat to the rights, privacy, safety, and dignity of women and girls. Um, okay. Let's see. Chris McGraw on Facebook asks, what is your estimation of the popularity be the prevalence of queer theory? And transsexualism, again, transactionalism, you'd have to define that for me in the culture. What can parents do to protect children against this ideology?
Speaker 1 00:52:45 So on the topic of the word transsexualism, that word was popular in pretty much from the sixties on, through the seventies and eighties. And that word was used to describe the population of people, mostly men who transitioned or who lived as women, or whatever phrase you want to say. Now there's a professor named Janice Raymond who wrote a book in 1979 called the transsexual empire in which she predicted all of this. Um, she knew what was coming. She saw it back in 1979. And then in 1994, she reprinted the book and an introduction in which she introduces the word transgender. When I read that introduction, I was, I was really surprised to learn that she knew about it as early as 1994, which means that it predated that right. It was, it was around in the early 1990s. Um, so, so we don't for the most part, use the term transsexual anymore.
Speaker 1 00:53:49 And I think there are healthy debates about whether we should. I see a lot of these debates playing out in the UK, uh, as to the question of the prevalence of so-called queer theory in schools. I don't know. I will say that the U S chapter of women's declaration international is engaged in a FOYA project where we are doing our best to file as many FOYA requests as we can in various local and state education departments so that we can find out what's being taught to kids in our country. What can parents do? I honestly genuinely think that parents are going to be an, a really important, um, group in the movement to push back against the abolition of sex, because parents, regardless of whether you have a kid who is caught up in this gender stuff, we're not parents care about the junk science that is being taught to kids. And I also just want to emphasize, again, this is true, regardless of political party. I honestly think that parents across the country have school-aged children have a tremendous opportunity to reach across the political aisle. I don't care if I'm talking to Democrats. I don't care if I'm talking to Republicans, independents or greens, parents can reach across the political aisle and stand up and say, stop teaching my children this stuff.
Speaker 0 00:55:12 Yes. Um, well, getting back to, uh, to the politics of, to maybe wrap this up, you have, uh, a long section of your book in which you're talking about, how, um, you see, or that this agenda, which isn't acknowledged has been pushed by the left is, um, feeding into a backlash against, uh, democratic party.
Speaker 1 00:55:38 It's so interesting because as I've gotten more involved in this, I've paid a lot closer attention to the spite in the UK, in the UK, the fight against gender identity is mainly coming from the left. It's mainly coming from feminists and leftists men in, in the labor party. And in, I believe it was 2018, maybe 2019 hundreds of women left the labor party in droves. They just left. They said, stop it labor, stop it, stop pushing this agenda on our children and stop engaging in these policies that are harming women and girls. I hear from Democrats every day on social media and in my email to talk about how disgusted they are with party leadership on this issue. I personally know one woman who is a radical feminist, and she was a Democrat. She went to her state's party leadership. She said, I want to present a leftist feminist critique of gender identity.
Speaker 1 00:56:36 They said, you're not welcome here. And she said, you know what, if you don't want my vote, you won't have it. She unregistered as a Democrat. She reregistered as a Republican. And now she's very active in her local Republican women's group. Uh, I know that that's the only person I know for sure, actually registered as a Republican, but I know countless, countless people who I know his personal friends who have unregistered as Democrats and reregistered his independence. I know people who've done this in Vermont, in Maryland, in upstate New York. I mean, I just know a ton of people who have done it, and I don't hesitate to tell democratic party leadership whenever I get the chance that this is happening, what happened to the labor party in the UK is going to happen to the democratic party here. I've got my personal reasons for remaining a Democrat. Um, and I'm going to stick with it for now, but we'll see what happens. Uh, democratic strategist, James Carville has not talked specifically about the gender issue, but he has also publicly warned Democrats that if they go in the direction that they're going, they're going to lose rank and file Democrats all over the country. And I think he's right.
Speaker 0 00:57:41 I think it's not just related to the gender identity movement, but, uh, the identity politics movement in general, I think there used to be a broad consensus in the United States that, um, that we're all individuals and, uh, we're pursuing our own interests and not necessarily, uh, need to be seeing ourselves as members of different, um, tribal camps with, uh, with conflicting interests. So we are actually at the top of the hour, Kara, anything that, uh, any final thoughts that you want to add? Um, again, folks, this is for book, the abolition of Sachs, how the transgender agenda harms women and girls. I would highly recommend that you get it with putting the, uh, Amazon link into the chat and an audible version is in the works. So Kara, how do we follow you? And for those who would like to help, what, uh, what can we do?
Speaker 1 00:58:44 Thanks so much. I just want to quickly say a lot of people in talking about this issue when they, when they listen to what we're saying, they say, wow, Kara, it almost seems like the whole transgender thing is, is an example of the emperor has no clothes. That's exactly right. This is an emperor who has no clothes. We're all running around acting as though the emperor's wearing clothes, because we all think that everyone else can see the emperor's clothes. And we all need to understand that this emperor is not wearing any clothes and we need to all be the kid who says so, and encourage others to stand up and say, so please, um, visit women's declaration.com, where you can find the global declaration on women's sex-based rights. It's been signed by nearly 30,000 people all over the world in several hundred countries. Please also visit the us chapter at women's declaration, usa.com, where you can learn more about what we're doing here to combat this. And if you'd like, you're welcome to follow
[email protected] as well, and on Twitter at Kate and skis.
Speaker 0 00:59:47 Wonderful. Well, thank you very much, Kara, for, for, um, taking the time to have this conversation with us, for taking the slings and arrows of, um, stating a politically inconvenient, incorrect truth, and, uh, for trying to, um, to preserve women's rights and their safety and their dignity and their safe spaces. We thank you.
Speaker 1 01:00:13 Thank you so much.
