Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1509 - Abigail Shrier
Uploaded: 2020-07-16T19:00:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1509 - Abigail Shrier' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1509 - Abigail Shrier' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1509 - Abigail Shrier

Hello, Abigail. How are you?
I'm doing great. How are you?
Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me on.
Irreversible damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters.
Boy, that's a hot buttons object, right?
That is a, this is a minefield.
It shouldn't be though.
No?
It really shouldn't be.
No, it shouldn't be.
But, so I think we should probably establish some things like up front, right?
Some people surely as adults are transgender.
Of course.
Yes.
Of course. I interviewed a lot of them.
And we fully support that, right?
Absolutely.
Okay.
I have friends who fall into that category.
Your concern is about very young children.
Teenage girls.
Teenage girls.
It has nothing to do with adults who are transgender, okay?
Many of whom are amazing people.
They, you know, went through mental health, you know, therapy, and they decided,
they made
these decisions.
They suffered with discomfort in their bodies from the time they were young.
And as adults, they made a decision to transition, fully support them, has
nothing to do with
my book.
What, what, what was the motivation to write this book?
And if it's about teenagers, why is there a very young girl on the cover?
Well, yeah.
Because this is like, the cover, it looks like a little girl.
A four-year-old.
Right.
It does.
I mean, obviously I didn't do the cover, but I think, I think the cover is very
good.
Because I think it's supposed to evoke what we've lost in our, a whole
generation.
Well, yeah.
What is that?
I assume her uterus.
Oh, it's just crazy.
Infertility is what's, yeah.
Oh, infertility.
Yeah, that's what, that's what happens.
I mean, I got involved in this.
This wasn't a personal issue for me.
In fact, it was an issue originally I thought I was going to avoid.
A reader wrote to me, I write most often for the Wall Street Journal, and a
reader wrote
to me and she said, listen, I've tried to get every mainstream journalist to
pick this
up.
No one will touch it.
But my daughter got caught up in this.
All of a sudden, she went off to college.
All of a sudden with her friend, she had a lot of mental health issues, anxiety,
depression.
And all of a sudden with her group of friends, they all decided they're trans
and she went
on hormones.
And this is happening to parents all across the country, teenage girls, all of
a sudden
deciding with their friends that they're trans, wanting surgeries and hormones
and getting
them.
And at first I thought, I don't need this.
And so I tried to get another journalist to take it up, a real investigative
reporter.
I'm not, I'm an opinion journalist usually, you know, that's what I've done.
And I couldn't get someone to take it up.
Because it's such a minefield.
Yeah, because it's a minefield because for some reason the activists who are
not representative
of transgender adults that I've met at all, but the activists had convinced the
world that
because, you know, they, you know, object to anyone's transition being
questioned, we
can't talk about a mental health issue facing teenage girls.
Now, I've heard there's an issue with some teenage girls who are on the
spectrum who wind up getting
sort of roped into this idea that that's what's wrong with them.
Is that one of the things you cover in your book?
Yeah, I actually don't deal with that specifically very much.
And the reason is that's a whole book in and of itself.
Because a lot of the, it is true that a lot of girls who are high functioning
autistic.
And I did interview some experts in autism.
And that's when I realized that's a book of its own, which is that a lot of
girls who are
high functioning autistic, you know, they tend to fixate.
And they had, they are particularly susceptible to fixating on the idea that
they might be a boy
when it's introduced to them.
So, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
And they are one part of this phenomenon, but they're a big part.
So the teenage girl part, so this is, you're talking about teenage girls that
are susceptible to influence?
Are you talking about teenage girls that are confused?
Like, why, why are there so many teenage girls that are going in this direction?
Like, what do you think is happening?
So these are the same girls that would have been anorexic.
They would have been bulimic and they would have been, they are high anxiety,
very precocious girls,
but they don't really fit in.
They come to high school and they don't have friends.
They don't have a clique for them.
And they're so smart and they're so lonely because they're on the internet all
the time
and they're with mom all the time and they don't fit in at school.
And this is a way to understand their pain that they're really feeling.
They're in pain, but they decide that their problem is that they're supposed to
be a boy
and the fix is testosterone.
So you heard of this problem.
You knew of people that their children were going through this.
And how long did it take you before you decided to commit to pen to paper on
this?
So I spent maybe a month or so just hearing the reports of the parents and
reading the original study.
There's an original study that the book is, you know, jumps off from,
which is the Lisa Litman paper at Brown University.
She's a public health researcher who looked into this.
And she found that there was all of a sudden this huge epidemic in America of
teenage girls deciding they were trans with their friends after social media
emerging and pushing for hormones and surgeries.
Have you had a conversation about this with someone who's a trans activist that
says, well, maybe what's really going on?
I mean, I'm just taking the argument of it.
Maybe what's going on is there are a lot of trans women and there would be more
or there's a lot of women who would turn trans, become a man.
There would be more, but they never had had that door open to them before.
And that maybe there's more trans people than we think.
Amazing.
Amazing.
So it's a great point.
And I thought about it because I've, you know, I tried to look.
I'm a journalist.
I like to look at ideas in both sides.
I didn't have, like, I did not have a dog in this race.
So let me tell you three reasons I don't think that's compelling.
Number one, when Lisa Litman looked at the prevalence rate, she found that it's
70 times what we would expect within a friend group,
which means it's highly concentrated in groups of friends.
But there's two other reasons.
So we wouldn't expect that if it were randomly distributed among the population.
But there are two other reasons I don't think that's right.
Number one, if we're just reverting to normal now that there's greater societal
acceptance, right?
We're just, say we're just reverting to a normal base rate of transgender women.
Why are all the women in their 40s and 60s coming out as trans?
They should be coming out.
Now's their time.
Now's their moment.
We should see tons of women in their 40s and 60s and so on coming out as
transgender.
We're not seeing that.
We're seeing the same population that gets involved in cutting, demonic
possession, witchcraft, anorexia bulimia,
and convinces themselves there's a problem.
And there's one, anyway, there's one last reason, is that suicide rates are
going up.
But if these women who were living under a prior, you know, supposedly all
these transgender,
these real transgender people who are living under a more repressive regime and
are now just finding themselves,
you would think the suicide rate would be going down with greater acceptance.
So when you're saying suicide rates are going up, you mean suicide rates with
teens who turn trans?
Both.
The rate of suicide among this population, first of all, among girls in general,
is extraordinarily high.
This is just one part of the mental health crisis they're in.
And second of all, we know that the rate that these kids, these trans-identified
kids, have very high rates of suicide, suicidal ideation.
It's really, you know, an area of real concern.
Well, there's definitely an area of real concern as well with social media.
Did you read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind?
Yeah, and it was on your show that I really like this light bulb went on when I
rewatched it because he talked about exactly this.
He connects it to social media and he talked about on your show the huge rates
we're seeing in anxiety, depression, all among these same girls.
And, you know, putting it together with Lisa Lippman's research and the other
investigation I'd done, I think it's really pretty clear that one more
manifestation of these girls who we know are involved in a lot of cutting and
all kinds of self-harm, this is one form of self-harm for them.
So there are children, so let's essentially say there's young teenagers that
are confused and they're looking for something that makes them feel whole or
something that makes them feel normal or something that gives them some sort of
an escape from this angst that they suffer from.
And you're thinking that turning trans is one of those pathways that they gravitate
towards, but it might not necessarily be a good idea for them.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
If these girls were transitioning to boys and they were living great lives and
their mental health was great, like it is for so many transgender adults, I
wouldn't have written this book.
That's a great story.
But is it great for so many transgender adults?
Because even in transgender adults, the suicide rate is very high.
There's no question.
And that's, you know, that's a separate issue.
But I do think that, yeah, I agree.
I think that there are, I personally believe that there are transgender adults
who've been helped by transition.
Sure.
But these girls are not being helped by transition.
Just universally?
I think as a population, yeah.
I mean, that's what Lisa Littman's study showed.
But also through my investigation, you know, I hear from, I interview a lot of
parents.
I also interview transgender youth.
And they, you know, they'll tell you their anxiety is a mess, their depression
is a mess.
Transition's not curing these girls.
They drop out of school.
They cut off their families.
They're not living a great life.
It's a, it's such a strange call, right?
And I mean, I mean, strange, I don't mean strange in a negative way.
I mean, it's, you're dealing with hormones in a human body.
Like you're, you're taking a woman and you're injecting hormones into her body.
And you're saying that these exogenous hormones are what's going to fix her.
And I never, I never understand that.
Like if, if this is my argument about this, like, how do we know, how do you
know that
that's, what's going to do it?
And when you are doing that, what damage is being done?
So it's one thing if someone's a 25 year old woman and they say, I have always
wanted
to be a man.
And I think I'm a man.
I think I was, I think I'm born in the wrong body.
But when you're going through this developmental cycle from 17, 18, 19, 20,
there is a lot
of chaos, a lot of hormonal chaos.
There's a lot of confusion.
I don't think there's anything specifically that you can point to that could
say some sort
of an intervention chemically, some sort of a, if you just step in now and
start injecting
this body with male hormones, it's going to fix all your problems.
But yet it's really popular to do that.
It's really popular.
These girls are getting it on their own diagnosis.
So they're just going in and self-diagnosing.
Nobody questions it.
We now have informed consent, which means you walk into Planned Parenthood, you
sign a waiver,
you decide you have gender dysphoria, you walk out that day with testosterone.
Planned Parenthood is doing this?
Yeah, it's one of the biggest distributors.
So you don't have to have some sort of a long, some sort of transitional
therapy session
with a...
You can get your breasts removed with no therapist note.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So you could be a confused 18-year-old girl and walk into a Planned Parenthood
self-diagnosing
with no thera