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Hello everyone. I'm here today with author and journalist Helen Joyce, her first book trans when ideology meets reality was a times of London bestseller in 2021. She's a long time staff journalist at the economist where she has held various senior positions, including Britain, editor, international editor and finance editor. She is currently on leave of absence from the economist to work with sex matters, a new human rights organization, campaigning for sex based rights. Thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me, Helen. I been reading your book over the last couple of days and found it, what would you call it? Unfortunately, compelling. That might be the right term and this issue of the transsexual rights and, and all of the fearer and upheaval around them seems in some odd way, key to the malaise that is central to our times. And so people have asked me, like, they've asked you why I've bothered dealing with it at all. Since it's hypothetically doesn't affect me personally, but maybe we could start with that because at the beginning of your book, you pointed out that well, writing this wasn't exactly good for your reputation. Let's say certainly exposed you to the mad affections of the mob, let's say. And, but on the other hand, as we noted in your biography, you are a journalist after all. So maybe we could start with your, your thoughts on why this book was necessary and, and timely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on it's really kind of you to talk to me about it. And I think unfortunately compelling is perhaps the, the best two words description of my book I've heard yet. So why did I write it? I mean, I've been a journalist now for approaching 20 years, and I think a journalist, a short description would be somebody who runs towards the burning building rather than away from it. So when you see something that's crazy compelling, a moving story, big news, you shouldn't say, oh, this is gonna be trouble. This is gonna be difficult to write about. You should go. Ooh, tell me more. And then when you start to interview people and you get reactions of the sort that you've never had before, and you know, for your listeners, I've, I've been a foreign correspondent. I've worked in Brazil. I've, I've written about pedophilia. I've written about the effects of pornography on teenager's brains. I've interviewed murderers, I've interviewed presidents and never before have I had the reaction that I had for this? Yeah. Well, that's also why I thought that, well, that's why I thought that opening with that background was so relevant because you have this immense experience as a journalist and you've covered all sorts of controversial issues. And yet you haven't been exposed to the kind of vitriol that this book attracted. And so I guess there's two questions about that. One is why in the world, would this be such a hot button issue, but, but also a hot button issue associated with that kind of mobbing in vitriol and what technological transformations say social media related. Do you think might be also contributing to the fact that someone like you can be targeted so effectively for communicating for communicating now? Yeah, two really good questions. I think that one of the reasons that the vitriol is so intense on this subject is that it's so linguistic, you know, when you say that men can become women by saying that they're women or vice versa, you're making a statement about language, not about reality and in the post, the postmodernist turn is precisely that turn in which the language takes precedence over the bedrock material, it itness of things. And so when somebody like me insists on talking about the reality that they see and refuses to use the words that are mandated, we're destroying the reality that people are trying to create. And since they see the reality that they're trying to create as something that is socially, just that they're trying to bring around, bring about a new Jerusalem. Someone like me is doing a very bad thing and should be silenced by any means necessary, including by lying about me or, you know, threatening me or trying to get me out of my job and so on. And then your second question was about social media. So why, why now? And I think there's a lot of reasons. It's a sort of perfect storm thing, but we are witnessing a social contagion and that social contagion is carrying what I increasingly think of as a, a new religion, a near religion. And it wouldn't be able to spread without social media and not just because social media is now in everybody's pockets, but because of specifics about social media in particular, the censorship role that Silicon valley firms take upon themselves. So I can't speak using the words that I regard as natural. If I do, I'll just lose my Twitter account straight away. I have to think about everything I wouldn't know about such things. Yes. I know you wouldn't well, yeah, you have to be very careful. You have to use their language because that's the language now of Silicon valley. And so it is very hard to say what I want to say using their language. Okay. So now you dived into the deepest part of this right off the bat. So I think we'll go, we'll talk about the idea that this is a linguistic battle, and then we'll turn back to the technological front. So one of the things that I've been trying to think through, cuz I think we will go down right down to the weeds in this to begin with is the, what seems to me to be the postmodern anti enlightenment and anti Judeo-Christian insistence that epistemology, which is the model of reality. Let's say that we use to guide ourselves Trump's ontology, which is reality itself. And so the postmodernists insisted that the meaning of words could only be adjudicated in relationship to other words. And so they thought of the whole linguistic Corpus as something like a massive dictionary where every word only bore meaning in relationship to other words, and really did attempt to deny or downplay the idea that there was an external transcendent reality deistic or objective that could serve as a corrective to these epistemological propositions. And I think that was driven in part by the underlying Marxist insistence that let's say power rules, everything, but also that human beings are infinitely malleable. And because of that can be molded and should be molded in the view of whoever happens to hold the utopian reigns, let's say, and all of that's tangled together and you also called this a Neo religion. And so that's why I'm bringing up all these additional factors because I think they play into this religious what's become a religious battle essentially. And we should also talk about why you and I have both of both concluded apparently that this is best construed as a religious battle. Yeah. I mean, I agree with every word that you say and in particular, I would say that the reason that this battle is being fought on women's bodies, particularly because if you want to say that sex isn't real and what people say about themselves is real, like formally that's symmetric that should affect everybody. But actually it affects women because women's bodies are more exigent than men's. So we are the ones who carry the babies basically. And I think that means that a large share of all women hit the bedrock reality of this is how we make new human beings. And it's easier for men to ignore that fact easier for men to think of themselves as a, a ghost in a machine or as a little humongous being carried around by a meat puppet as someone who could become immortal as someone who could, you know, cut the fleshly bonds or that, you know, we could start doing wound transplants, all these things. Like if you've had that experience of growing another human being and then having to get it out of you, you are just a much less, you're just much less amenable. Shall we say to these sorts of illusions? And so here in, in Britain, one of the major sites of resistance to all of this is mum's net, which has this reputation as being a site where you talk about, you know, what are the best diapers to buy or what's the best formula or, you know, is my husband being a jerk or whatever, but actually it's also where women talk about this movement to turn the word woman into something that just means a feeling, a feeling that can be in a man's head. Okay. So, so a couple of ideas about that, three of them, I guess, three ideas. The first is that my understanding of the anthropological literature in relationship to initiation rituals in anachronistic, tribal communities let's say, or, or primordial tribal communities, is that the initiation rituals for men are more severe generally than those for women. And the, one of the hypotheses about that is that while women run smack into biological reality, not least in the form of menstruation, but then just, but then definitely in the form of pregnancy and childbirth. And so they get initiated into the actuality of ontology, the bedrock reality by nature, whereas that has to be done culturally with men. And so, and then the next thing is you, you said that women have to contend with biological reality in a way that men don't because of that. And that might, might be true, especially once a woman has been pregnant and had a child, which tends to grow people up in a very radical way, but it is also markedly the case that the people affected by this gender dysphoria epidemic happened to be young women and knocked young boys. And so that's something that we could talk about. And well, maybe we'll just leave. We'll just leave it at that for the time being oh yeah. Oh, sorry. The last thing was, you said that it's the reality of feminine existence. That seems to be the place where this religious battleground is taking place. And then you tied the notion of reality to the necessity of reproduction. And that's actually a really good definition of what constitutes reality and that, that is relevant to some of the facts that you laid out in your book. So for example, one of the facts is these are biological and evolutionary facts that sex emerged 1.2 billion years ago. And so that's an awful long time ago. It's way before trees. It's way before many of the things that we regard as fundamental Cardinal elements of reality, the brain evolved 500 million years ago and the cerebrum 200 million years ago. And what this means is that by the time we developed a central nervous system and were able to conceptualize at all, cognitively speaking sex had been a biological reality for several hundred million years. And one of the things that bothered me about the compelled speech legislation in Canada, that mandated that people use the pronouns of other people's choice was that I thought two things. I thought, number one, that that was an assault on what might be the most fundamental perceptual category in the human cognitive lexicon and perceptual universe that our, our, the entire way we, we envision reality has a sex oriented, underlying symbolic structure. And one of the consequences of introducing this mandated primacy of subjective identity would be the destruction of our ability to communicate, and also the dissemination of a tremendous amount of confusion among impressionable young people. So I figured when the pronoun laws first came to existence, that we would produce a psychogenic epidemic, which is exactly what, what happened and that it would particularly affect young women because that's where psychogenic epidemics tend to originate. If you look at the historical data and that confusion psychogenic epidemic and inability to communicate has stemmed precisely from this deep philosophical or even I would say in some sense, even theological move. Now, does any of that seem to you to be stating the case too seriously? No, not at all. I would completely agree with everything that you said there. So I would say about the, the psychic epidemic that's playing out in teenage girls, we do see psychic epidemics in teenage girls first or worst. They're the people who become anorexic. They're the people who self-harm, they're the people who went through these hysterical, laughing episodes and so on. If you could look back historically speaking, I don't think anyone knows exactly why, but it's a, an observable fact at this point, but also I know why, oh, you know why I can tell you why? Yeah. Go. Well, I know some of why. Well, look when boys and girls are given personality tests before they hit puberty, there's not a lot of difference in average level of negative emotion experienced. But as soon as girls hit puberty, they're proclivity to experience negative emotion. So that shame and guilt and disappointment and fear and depression is elevated markedly in contrast to men. And it's permanently transformed at puberty and it stays stable for the rest of women's lives. And so women reliably experience more negative emotion than men. On average. Now there's wide individual difference, and there's some men who experience more negative emotion than women, but we're talking about. And what that means, at least in part is that the people, almost all the people who experience the highest levels of negative emotion, and that would include self consciousness and shame are female. And that kicks in at puberty really interesting at pub. Well at puberty, too, kids have to restructure their identities in quite a major way. And that's especially true for girls because they have, first of all, it happens to them earlier, right? So they're less mature when nature comes calling. Let's say, plus, as soon as puberty kicks in, they have these elevated levels of negative emotion. And one of the things we know this is so interesting as far as I'm concerned, is that if terms that are reminiscent of self-consciousness load almost perfectly onto negative emotion. So there's almost no difference whatsoever between being self-conscious and in and experiencing guilt and shame and anxiety. And so if you add the stress of puberty and that physical transformation to the emotional transformation, and then you take an extreme, the extreme outliers on the negative emotion, continua, it's all women, it's all young women. And we know as well from the literature on gender dysphoria, that the individuals who experience gender dysphoria, first of all, don't have suicidal ideation or those sorts of symptoms, any more highly than people who experience non-gender dysphoria psychiatric disorders. So it's a class of general psychiatric disorder. And if they're ex associated with negative emotion, that's gonna mostly affect young women. We'll get right back to Helen Joyce in just a moment. 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Atium also offers cutting edge solutions to help support your metabolism and immune system signal helps you maintain a healthy metabolism, which declines as you age format is a next generation immune supplement that clears problematic cells that slow immune response in honor of September being a healthy aging month, JB listeners can get a special offer for a limited time only go to health.com/jordan and enter code age healthy checkout to save 25% sitewide on allium products. That's Alesia health.com/jordan promo code age healthy. That makes such sense. And they turn it onto their own bodies as well. Like the shame and self definitely get turned onto their bodies. And in particular their breasts, it's not, it's not, it's not by chance that they're cutting their breasts off. Like you put these bad into your breasts and you cut it off. Well, it is, it is this self-consciousness at the body level. It's, it's clear as well from the evolutionary research. So women evaluate men for physical attractiveness and sense of humor and intelligence and so forth, but they also evaluate them on the basis of either social status or perceived capability to gain productive social status. Okay. Men do not evaluate women for that, but they do evaluate them on the basis of their physical appearance. And they look for signs of Fecon and youthfulness. And so women are judged more harshly by each other, by men and by biology itself, let's say on the basis of their physical appearance. And so they have reason to be more self-conscious and the reason they're they experience more negative emotion. As far as I can tell at puberty, I think there's three factors that contribute to that is one is you get physical dimorphism, really emerging at puberty because boys get to be bigger than girls. And so that means if girls engage in physical combat with males, they're more likely to be hurt and hurt badly. And so they should be more afraid in those encounters and they are, and then women are also more sexually vulnerable than men because they bear the burden of, of pregnancy and childbirth. And then also, and this is worth thinking about as far as I can tell is that there's no reason to assume that women's nervous systems are adapted to make women comfortable. They might be adapted to make women hypersensitive to the sensitivity of infants, and that'll make women more tuned to environmental dangers. And the cost of that is that women suffer more emotionally. So you could, you could imagine that the female nervous system might be optimally tuned for the mother infant died and not for the mother herself. And so, and then if you add to that, the fact that all of those factors tend to make women experience more negative emotion than men. And then that girls run into that young, when they hit puberty, then they're casting about, for an explanation for that misery. And if that's provided for them to them by the context, then they can be susceptible to emotional contagion, any, and, and social contagion, anything that's associated with explanation for the negative emotion or any way out of it, like anorexia, like cutting like body dysmorphia, they're gonna be more susceptible to that sociological to those sociological fads. That all sounds incredibly familiar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and they, and they jump onto whatever, whatever is offered to them. And I would say about the, the trans social contagion in particular is it's sold as a 100% immediate solution. Like nobody tells an anorexic girl that we can just switch the anorexia off, but they do say to kids, if you, if your gender dysphoric, if you transition magically, you'll be better. And that all your problems will be solved because your problems stem from not understanding that you're actually really a boy. And one other thing I would add, I'd be interested to hear if this resonates with you, something that feminists have lamented really for decades is the way that unlike men, there's not very much age solidarity among women. So young, a young man may look at a middle aged man, or even an older man and say, that's what I'd like to be like. Whereas younger women I've noticed this really personally tend to almost despise women past the menopause. And I think a lot of what they're saying is that they don't want to become that person, person, like women don't want to become their mothers. Yeah. Well, that's that, that's pretty awful. Isn't it? And well, I would say there, there's a couple of reasons for that. I mean, my wife has started a podcast series where she's interviewing older women. Who've had successful careers in families to have them lay out the course of their career and be rigorously truthful about it. I think part of the reason that there's two reasons maybe that young women might have that attitude towards older women. And one is, I think that younger women are lied to almost all the time and they're lied to partly by older women. I'm not gonna put this on older women, right? Because it's complicated. But you know, younger women are told in no uncertain terms that the only important thing for them and what will be vital to their identity and what should be vital to their identity, if they're decent and honorable and ambitious young women is their career. And that's simply not true for most women. And it's also not true for most men, by the way, it's definitely true for a subset of men, but for most women, the optimal life. And I think most women discover this in their thirties is a well balanced aggregation of family, marriage, and career. And I'll tell you every time I've made that comment, people have clipped out, say three minutes of me talking about that idea. I get the most vitriol comments that I've ever got when I've ever discussed anything. And all of them come from young women. And they're so vicious that it's beyond. It's actually beyond belief. And so that's an echo of what. And then while then the other thing is our entire culture has turned viciously against motherhood. You know, we, we presume that if you're a moral agent, then you shouldn't bring any more rapacious human beings to expand the cancerous growth of humanity onto the planet. And that if you're a woman who wants to be a mother, then you're a second rate citizen because you've subordinated your proper desire to have a career in the patriarchal world, to this anachronistic birth machine mechanism that you don't want to be destined to. And all of that is pathological beyond comprehension, but it's also the situation that we happen to be in right now. And I think we devalue age and in particular, we devalue age in women like women, you know, women, once they're past the menopause are no longer seen as valuable because they're no longer beautiful and no longer potentially fertile. And I, I see the contradiction between that and what you're saying, but I think both are true. And so young women, don't like the thought that they're going to turn into older women. I mean, I remember I was a young woman once I think too, you know, that to the degree that we devalue family and, and continuity between generations, that also leaves the vital role of older women somewhat up in the air. Because one of, of the major roles that older women can play is, is as wise guides to younger women, making their way through the complexities of career and family, and also to play out the role of supportive grandparent and to be there within that family context. And if we devalue family, then we reduce people to their career and their individual attractiveness. And then if attractiveness on the sexual front is waning that reduces it to career. And if the career isn't stellar, then what's the remaining signifier of value. And the answer is well, very little. And that's a pretty damn dismal prospect for anybody who, anybody who's female, who's moving through the world. So Yeah. And you don't like to look forward and see that that's what's coming for you. So that's quite, that makes it quite important not to listen to what older women say, you know, to parody what somebody like me says about, say child safeguarding, like to mock it and to say things like, oh, won't someone think of the children? Well, yes, I do want to think of the children. Thanks. You know, I am a mother. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's one of the most important things I do is think of the children, but that seems mock worthy to a lot of younger people. And in particularly strangely to a lot of younger women, Well, you know, you know, the other thing that seems to happen, I would say too, is that the social media networks are set up so that casual, derogatory derisive narcissistic mocking is not only allowed, but staggeringly prevalent And encouraged. It's not well that's, that's, it, it, it attracts attention and is encouraged. Now, you know, we have to talk during our conversation today about the role that narcissism plays in all of this. Yes. The mobbing, the derisive online comments and the transsexual phenomenon itself, as well as this claim that subjective claims to identity Trump, everything, because there is no more signaling narcissistic claim than that. Yes, I am who I say I am. And no one else has a say, it's like, well really in a marriage, let's say, you're just who you say you are. You don't have to negotiate your identity with your wife or husband. You never do that with your children. You never do that with your friends. They just go along with whatever game you wanna play every bloody second of your life, do they? And if they don't, that makes them evil predators and, and valid targets for derision and mocking and worse than that. Because as you know, perfectly well, this online mobbing behavior that's driven by thoughtless narcissists not only is psychologically destabilizing because of its vitriolic quality, but also can certainly reach its tendrils into the confines of your job. Let's say mean it's become impossible for me to work as a psychotherapist. I had to leave my job at the university because it be became impossible to be for me to function in both those domains. And so I would say this narcissism is also encouraged by it's encouraged by educational institutions because they take young people in and they say, well, you know, your, your immature messianic desire to save the world, which could be admirable if channeled properly, should manifest itself in this vehement activism that puts you in position of ultimate moral authority over your seniors, let's say instantly. And that's what you should be doing. And anyone who poses that is well evil and, and predatory at best. And as a consequence, no punishment is too extreme. And alongside that, that you must choose your identity off a list of dozens and sometimes hundreds like that require the most intense, constant rumination. And self-examination, I mean, I was talking to somebody just yesterday who was telling me that a child who's 12 now, you know, has this check sheet for how do I feel? And this is a really happy child, but you're meant to be thinking all the time. Like, how am I feeling right now? Am I, as you know, on a scale of one to 10, how happy am I, how this am I, how that am I, how the other am I, this is all terribly bad idea. Well, it's clearly it's clearly bad. Look, look, one of the things I learned when I was treating people who were socially anxious, I, I had a lot of anxious people in my, in my clinical practice, which is hardly surprising because that that's the kind of suffering that requires people to seek clinical intervention. So socially anxious people when they go into a new social situation, think obsessively about how others are thinking about them. Yes. And so then they become, self-conscious often about broadly issues, but not only that they might become self-conscious about their lack of conversational ability and the fact that they're not very interesting. And the fact that they're being evaluated by their people, it's a litany of obsessive thoughts. And you can, you might say, well, you could train people to stop thinking about themselves, but you can't stop people from thinking about something by telling them to stop thinking about something. But what you can train people to do is to think more about other people. And so one of the techniques that I used in my practice was okay, now, when you go into a social situation next time, like we'd go through the niceties of introducing yourself and making sure they knew your name and get that ritualized so that it was practiced an expert and therefore not a source of anxiety. But the next thing is your job is to make the other person that you're talking to as comfortable as possible to pay as much attention to them. And so we know that the more you think about yourself, this is literally true. There is no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable. They load on the same statistical access. And so these kids that are constantly being tormented by 150 identities. So that's a, a front, not of freedom, but of utter chaos and then asked to constantly reflect on their own state of emotional wellbeing. And happiness is the surest route to the kind of misery that's going to open them up to, to psychogenic epidemics. Let's say the clinical data on that are clear. And then you land into that. The idea that you may have been led to believe that because you are a not very feminine girl or a not very masculine boy, that that means that really you are of the opposite sex. The fact is you're not. And no one around you is going to think that you are because you don't look like the opposite sex and you become even more. Self-conscious like, self-consciousness brought you to this point. And now you are hyper aware that everyone around you doesn't think of yourself as the way that you've just presented yourself. And then you're watching for misgendering. And you know, you're, you are, you are actually being told that it's a really terrible thing to do and that no one would do this unless they really hated you. And they wanted you to die. Like they want you to disappear. They want trans people dead. They want them gone. You know? I mean, that's what people say about me that I want, you know, to cause a genocide of some sort. And I mean like when did I ever write such a thing? So what, what that is is it's the feeling that you've put all of your ability to care about yourself, understand yourself, define yourself onto other people and how they're looking at you. And they're not looking at you. Right. They're looking at you funny. So you, you know, you are now out of control, Add to that mix. Okay. So we could add a couple of other layers. So kids that are well socialized and popular develop that ability between the age of two and four, right? And what they undergo this psychological transformation in identity. They go from a two year old egocentric. So that two year old can only play a game with him or herself. They can't play a shared game. And so two year olds will play in parallel, but they can't play a joint game. And that means that their identity, this is so important, their identity is purely subjectively defined and they have temper tantrums. If you interfere with that, okay. Now between two and four, most kids extend their identity out into the communal world. And so one of the ways they do that is imagine two little kids between the age of say three and five playing house, a little boy and little girl, the little boy, last little girl, do you want to play house? And she'll say yes. And so what that means now is they've established a joint identity for, for the time span of their play. And the joint identity is that they're both engaged in the same epistemological world in the same conceptual world. And then they negotiate roles say, well, all be the daddy and you be the mommy. And they can flip that role by the way. And sometimes they will because they wanna play out the other side. But generally they pick a sex appropriate role for obvious reasons. And then having established the goal. So let's pretend about the household, which is a form of thought. They have to jointly establish an identity that's acceptable to each other. And then they have to do something even more sophisticated, which is they have to conduct themselves in those roles. So that the game is fun so that both people will keep playing. And so that both people want to keep playing with each other. Now it doesn't take much thought to see that that's exactly, that's an analog and a prod Roma to what you actually do as an adult. When you enter a intimate relationship, that's long term is you play house in the long run. But so what happens is between the age of two and four, your identity moves from egocentric and subjectively defined to communal and negotiated. And now this idea that we have that your identity is only what you say it is appeals, not only to, I suppose, the ideologues that are pushing it, but it also appeals to people who are developmentally stuck. And I mean, this in the deepest sense are stuck at a two year old level of psychological development. And I think maybe there's a couple of reasons for that. Imagine there, a lot of kids are only kids now, so they're not socialized by their siblings. A lot of kids have older parents with lots of resources. So they're sheltered in a way that children never have been. And a lot of kids are exposed to computer screens and TV screens at a very early age. So they don't have the opportunity to engage in the kind of dramatic play that helps them develop an extended social identity. And so it's possible on top of all this, that we have an epidemic of narcissism that's being capitalized on by the woke ideologues who are also likely suffering from the same psychopathology. Yes. And so you, you see a lot of things together, you see a lot of different needs or weaknesses or pathologies that are playing out in sync with each other. And so these children, I, I, I really do think that they're victims, they're, they're necessary victims of an ideology. So if you are an adult man who wishes to be seen as a woman, and the most important thing that you want is to have people believe that this is something innate, that people are born this way. And that means there must be children who are trans and it's, it's not relevant to you, whether or not that's actually the case for the individual children. The children are the sacrificial victims of the ideology. And so you've got adults who are using children as props for their description of who they are. Okay. So let's, so let's dive into that. So one of the things you do in your book is you detail out a lot of sexual fetishes tracing them back a couple of hundred years. So imagine that you're a hyper-masculine male. Imagine you're a little narcissistic in your masculinity, and let's say there's a part of your psyche that regards that as unbalanced. And so what happens is you start to have fantasies about the value of the Contra sexual temperamental virtues. And those would be the feminine ones. But given that you're not very conceptually sophisticated, maybe the way that counterbalancing tend manifests itself in you is in fantasies of being female. And that, that fantasies are so damn deep that they actually involve even the sexual impulse. So Carl Young, who I think thought more deeply about this than anyone else believed that as we move through life, that, and we expanded our personalities, that we would expand them beyond the confines of a rather stereotypical gender identity and incorporate the virtues of the sex that we weren't. So that would mean for women, that they would become more emotionally stable and also more disagreeable as they got older. And for men, it would mean that they became more emotionally vulnerable and more compassionate as they got older, at least they would extend their capability into those domains. And that was a necessary part of expansion and maturity. And then if that's for stalled by, by narcissism, let's say, or even by inability, then the proclivity to develop those Contra sexual tendencies would start to manifest itself in the kinds of fantasies that you described as characteristic of the auto gyil transsexuals. And so then if you think that narcissism is part of what's driving that, right, I'm, I'm pushing too hard in the direction that I'm going. And so these fantasies manifest in a compensatory way that you get a perfect storm. And it's the narcissists who are doing this, that insist upon subjective identity and who also by the way, are perfectly willing to sacrifice children to their own purposes. Absolutely. And, and two things that you notice when you look at these people are one, what they're seeing when they look in the mirror is not what you are seeing. They're, they're seeing, they're seeing a fantasy, they're seeing a fantastic version of themselves, but you who are not in love with this, this idea, this idea of the feminine version of this man, you are seeing something a lot less flattering, and that's very hurtful to them. That's experienced. I, I think as a psychic insult that, you know, because it is like being flipped out of the fantasy, like if you're in this beautiful fantasy and then someone laughs or someone calls you, he, and then that's that's narcissistic rage is what you see as the response to that. That's Right. That's that's right. It's and it's, it's narcissistic rage at, in many ways the same level that you'd see an thwarted two year Old. Yes. Yes. And it feels like that when you're at the receiving end, I have to say, yeah, Well, that's for sure It I've done both exactly that Well. Right. And when, when you see, when you see these activists on this front melt down and have a tantrum, if especially if you have a clinical eye or you've been a parent, you think, oh my God, like that's, that's exactly what two year olds do. And that's a hell of an early developmental level to be fixated at, you know, know two that's really bad. That's really bad that that shows a real disjunction in, in psychological development. So it's no wonder this is, this is felt as seriously affecting by the people who are affected because so deep. And it involves core issues of identity. And I think it must be felt very differently by a man. Who's looking at it like you and a woman like me, because it's not just that it's offensive that this man is doing what looks to me like a poor and very Paraic imitation of a woman. It's also that I am expected to play along in a way that it really casts me as, as a supporting actress in my own life. And if I step out of role, the rage that this brings down is absolutely extraordinary. Like you're acceptable as a woman, as long as you're going along with this. And then if you mention any tiny little bit of need that a woman might have that just one vulnerability that a woman needs that really requires that all males are excluded from somewhere, all males, even the males who identify as women, you have it's it's as if you it's, as if you've done the worst thing that it's possible to do. It's like saying to the, the two year old go to bed or brush your teeth, or no, you can't another biscuit. And it is, it's a meltdown. I, I presume it does feel dreadful to that person, but it's, it's ugly to see it in an adult. Oh, I'm, I'm sure it does. Well, it's terrible. If you watch a two year old having a temper tantrum carefully be, and most people won't, cuz they'll turn away because it's too disturbing. If you watch a two year old having a temper tantrum, one of the things you realize is that the overcoming of their developing ego by those internal systems of rage and distress is a catastrophic defeat for the, for the beginning, unity of the individual. And so then what you do, if you're a parent with any clue is that you set up the environment. So that tantrums are brought to a halt and eradicated in some sense in as a form of acceptable behavior, as rapidly as possible. And you don't do that by suppressing the child's capacity for anger or distress, you do that by integrating the capacity for distress and anger into a higher order personality. And so, and this, you, you said, you talked about this parody element. So let's go into that. Cuz I've noticed this too. A lot of the behavior that I see on the part of people who are Aing women, let's say looks to me like a parody. And I think that part of the reason they get so mad at women who don't play along is because they also have this fantasy of women femininity as merely as passive receptive, all encompassing, you know, it's kind of the counterpart to the submission element that goes along with dominance and submission play that you often see more hyper-masculine men attracted to. And so I think that by why women, when women stand up for themselves, they also violate the image of docile and receptive femininity that plays such a major role in the fantasy life of the people who are engaged in say cross-dressing. So I think that's absolutely right. And I would add something else to that, which is that I think that both sexes do have a somewhat, maybe idealized version of what it is to be a member of the opposite sex. And you know, a man may have a fantasy version of what it, you know, it just an ordinary man, an ordinary heterosexual man who is happily married and has female friends. He may also just have some quite fantastical ideas about what it would be like to be a woman like that. You know, you can lie back and let the man do the work or that it must be lovely to, to be so fragrant all the time or something you have, you know, you have these very superficial ideas of what it is to be a member of the opposite sex. And that's true. I have to say in pornography as well, like women as imagined by men in pornography or nothing like real women, just like the men who are written by women in erotica are nothing like real men. And you see that too in these what look to me like parodies, but I don't think they're intended to be parodies. They're not meant to be insulting. The man is describing what he sees. I wouldn't be so sure about that. I wouldn't. Okay. Interesting. Not sure about that. Well, because we also don't know to what degree the vitriol that's directed towards women. That's a consequence of this narcissism is also a reflection of a genuine hatred. Yes. And this is why we should never forget just exactly what kind of radical and revolutionary genius SIG Freud really was. Yes. Because Freud put his finger on the key pathology of our time. Even our time more than his, because he regarded the EDOL complex as the source of all pathology and the, the EDOL complex was essentially the catastrophic consequences of the non-judgmental non-discriminating hyper compassionate, all accepting maternal spirit. And so Freud's idea was something. And you can think about this biologically too. Freud's idea was something like this. So human beings are peculiar among animals, let's say, and there are two or three developmental reasons for this first we're born fetal. So because there's an arms race between the child's head circumference and the, and the carrying capacity of the female pelvis for purposes of birth, if the pelvis was any wider in the hole, in the middle, any wider than females, Total everywhere. Yeah. That's right. Exactly. And so the way we've ironed that out over evolution is that babies are born far too young. Yeah. They're born at nine months instead of two years and their heads are compressible. And so, and that's why the mortality rate for human babies is so high. It's a real narrow passage into life, let's say. Yes. Okay. And so what that means is that humans are hyper are hyper dependent, particularly for the first two years. But then because we also have this amazing plastic socially constructable brain, at least to some degree, we have this, this immense period of dependence. Now the risk in that is that because we're so dependent, an excess of compassion is necessary, especially in the first six months, because imagine the right response to a human infant under six months of age is you're 100% correct about anything that distresses you 100% of the time and your needs have to take priority over absolutely everything else. And mothers have to be wired to provide that. Yes. Now the problem is, so this is why the psychoanalyst, they said the good mother necessarily fails. And so the mother has this terrible conundrum. She has to be willing to sacrifice herself to this infant fully. But then as the infant matures, she has to sacrifice her own compassion and pull back and start to become harsh and more encouraging and demanding simultaneously. Now, if she has a man along with her, that's easier because it's easier for him to play that role. And that's a Cardinal role that the masculine spirit plays, but Freud's point was, well, this protracted period of dependence exposes us to the terrible risk that we never emerge out of infancy. And the terrible devouring mother is a symbol of the person for whom compassion has become a hyper dominant and devouring force. And that is precisely the pro the political problem of our time. So that this reflexive compassion that is now deemed it, it's deemed morally necessary. That it must govern everything. If you don't feel absolutely 100%, sorry for people as if they're infants, then you are a predator And, and two things that you, that I was thinking when you said that one was that what I'm doing. When I refuse to accept a man who says, he's a woman as a woman, is I'm like the mother who's refusing to give the infant to what he wants, which is really a wicked person. We think very poorly Predator people. Yeah. And, and so, so the rage is there. I'm stepping out role for a woman. And I think the other one is the, the most enraging thing for anybody is to desperately want to be something that they can never be or to desperately want something that they can never have. And so, you know, a man who's got himself into this head space where he can be a woman in his own mind, somebody who says no, and that no can be in 1000000th of the world. It can just be in one place. It could just be in rape crisis centers say that's not good enough. That's not good enough. That is that's right. Taking away the dream and, and being a very bad woman, stepping outta role for a woman. Well, Well, especially for this hyper idealized feminine, compassionate woman, right? Yes. It's all encompassing and all loving and all nurturing. And you see this again in two year olds, you know, I'm just, just watching this right now with my grandson, the most, the most magic word, the magic word for two year olds is not please. The magic word for two year olds is no. Yes, Love It. And I would say 20% of the utterances of a two year old is no. And that's because no is the word you use to give yourself some space in some sense. And so two year olds don't like it when you say no to them. Yeah. That makes them mad. And they push the boundaries as they should, because they need to find where the boundaries are. That's what you should do when you're two. And if, if you haven't had those boundaries organized for you in a systematic way, that in enables you to expand your personality so that you can find alternative cooperative roots to adaptation, and you just face this arbitrary, no. Or you don't face it at all, then you're gonna end up being a person for whom no is a, well, it has the same effect on you as it does on a reque two. Yearold it demolishes your entire emotional being the same way that no demolishes the world of a two yearold. Yeah. I mean, and the strange thing, the very strange thing is that sometimes this is described as, you know, conservative or even libertarian values. So I just saw somebody here recently say, I'd like to see the conservative party here in England, make the case for self ID, the conservative case for self ID, that it's not anybody else's business to tell you who you Are. That's such rubbish. Exactly, exactly. It's total MIS interpretation. Yes. Well, the idea that identity is subjectively defined is utterly preposterous. Yes. It doesn't apply. It doesn't apply in any situations where there's more than one person involved. And then this weird evolution of that idea, it's like, well, not only do you get to say exactly what you are now, first of all, we could talk about what you are, what, what you are means. But the second part of that is, and it depends on your feeling well, what is that feeling? Is that your moment to moment balance between positive and negative emotion, that's now the arbiter of reality itself. And then what are you? Well, the answer to the question, what are you is it depends on the context and we actually know this personality, researchers know this, so we all have a temperament, Hey, that's partly biologically instantiated and partly socially constructed. But if you look at how much our innate temperament measures of our innate temperament can be used to predict our behavior from situation to situation, it tops out at about nine to 16%. So that means, and maybe 25% in the case of IQ, which is the most powerful temperamental factor, we know 75% of what determines your outcome, even on the cognitive front is social context. And that means like the progressives claim to, to, to, to believe that about 80% of your personality is socially negotiated, 80%. And that, so that, and so also what that means is imagine you're temperamentally extroverted. And so you want to talk like I do all the bloody time, I'm still gonna shut up mostly in a funeral. Right, right. Right. Now I might be the most talkative person at the funeral. Right. But I'm still gonna use the context to regulate my behavior. And what that means is that the context actually defines my identity. And that's how it should be. That's what happens if you're a civilized person, is the context defines your identity period, the end. Yeah. And then the strange thing that layers on top of that is that not only are they saying that how you feel defines who you are, they're saying that it defines who you are, that you are a woman, or you're a man, when those are just about the most, you know, concrete things about us, the most non-negotiable things about us, the most bedrock things about us, like far more than our IQ. Well, they might be the most bedrock thing about us. Right. Which maybe is why the culture war is centering on this issue. Because if it is a war between epistemology and ontology or between, let's say narcissistic delusion and reality itself, then the battle devolves to identity on the grounds of sex. Right. Is what did, what did Freud say? Biology is destiny. Yeah. And I mean, I don't believe that entirely. Well, it isn't true entirely. Well, We, on top of biology, we have, you know, we have got this civilization that we've built and it's very, it's very anchored to biology. Of course it is. But it is also to some extent, malleable that we do, re-negotiate it in different societies to some extent on top of that. But then to have this idea that a man can say, I wish I was a woman, or I feel like I'm really a woman, or I think I'm a woman inside, which are things that only a man can say, I can't wish to be a woman. I can't feel like I should have been a woman. Those are things that are only possible for men. And then those things are meant to make you a woman. And then it's so detached from reality that there's, there's no tether. It can go anywhere like this can just float off to anything at all. And that's why we see this weird proliferation of, you know, a poor agenda or somebody being gray, sexual or something, you know, it's got it's, it goes off into sort of almost stamp collecting levels of, of precision and difference and so on. Well, there's another issue that comes up there too, is, is so, and this is relevant to your claim, which is entirely warranted that we are, we vary on top of our biology. And so for example, there is a lot of biological and socially constructed variants in temperament on top of biological sex. And so you, you could say without fear of error, that a reasonable percentage of boys have a feminine temperament. And so that would mean they're, they have more negative emotion, they're more compassionate. And they're more interested in people than in things. Those are the Cardinal differences between the masculine and the feminine and a non-trivial number of boys have those characteristics, just like a non-trivial number of girls are less compassionate and polite. So more competitive. Let's say they're more emotionally stable and they're more interested in things. Now those are relatively rare girls and relatively rare boys, but statistically they're hardly, what would you say? They're hardly, they're not so rare that you don't see them all the time. It might be 10% of boys are essentially feminine in their temperament, 10% of girls and that's a lot and what that should. And so that's at the level of temperament, which is really where gender should be conceptualized because there are no good measures of gender. There are good measures of temperament and interest that differentiate men and women. Like if you, if you use measures of temperament, including interest, you can reliably identify someone as a man or a woman about 80% of the time, something like that. So you can do it 50 50 on the basis of chance and with the good, with the best measurements we have, you can get that up to 75, 25 or 80 20, but that's certainly by no means perfect identification. And so one of the things that's perverse about this too, isn't it is that despite the claims of the radicals, that identity is socially constructed and variable, there are fundamental notion is that if you have a variable temperament, so if you're a feminine boy, then what that means is that your biological reality is out of sync. Yes. Because the biology is so fundamentally important in that case, but never in any other case. Yes, yes, Yes. It's so in it's so incoherent man. It's unreal. It can completely, and I mean, also if we were to say, which would be a terrible thing to say, and I don't say it, if we were to say that this 10 or 20% of boys who are actually statistically speaking more like the standard for girls, if we were to say, well, actually they're really girls. That's not what we're seeing. There's no objective claim here that would at least be semi objective. It would be absolutely repulsive as well. They're just slightly outta the ordinary boys, you know? But it's the people who are claiming that a man can tell you, he's a woman or a woman can tell you, she's a man. You know, there's no, there's no way you could say NA, you're actually just very like a man. So you can't be a woman. Like in particular, he could be a rapist, which is the most masculine thing, you know? So we don't even say that a trans woman who commits rape thereby demonstrates that this claim to be in some gendered way, really a woman has, has it's been disproved. Yes. So in your book, you also talk about, oh yes. So there's another element that's at work here too. And that, that is the, the trans transformations are also on the cutting edge of a transhumanism. That's also aimed at the, in some sense at the eradication of death itself, right? So there's another utopian dream that's sitting underneath this, which has its positive element. I would say too, because we are trying to improve the length of our life and to rejuvenate ourselves. And there's an open question here is, well, how far can the transformations of our identity go in an increasingly technological world? And how far should they go? And so, and the transhumanist types who, who believe for example, that our consciousness could be uploaded into a computer and that we could be propagated forever, also have a proclivity to fall into the camp that says that your identity is only what you say it is, right? It's this soul idea that's, that's independent of the body. And there's a wish in that to be free of the change and constraints of of mortal existence and, and you can understand that as well, but it's, but running away from something into fantasy is not the way to address it. I mean, it is a fantasy, isn't it? And it's a fantasy that's rather similar to being of the opposite sex, the fantasy that, you know, you can control death itself. That life and death are in your hands. It's the fantasy of being a God, not just being immortal, but being a God. And sometimes people express that as you know, terribly light ways to talk about what are major operations like anyone who's been through sex reassignment surgery as it's called. Although of course we can't actually reassign sex will tell you that this was a major operation. And the question of how, how content you are with the outcome depends a lot on how realistic your ideas about it beforehand were. So if you're someone who's lived with gender dysphoria for many years and you do it, then you, it may actually just make you feel a bit better. But if you thought you could be turned into the opposite sex, you will be disappointed because these are, we are not made of meat Lego. I also don't think that the data that this actually makes people feel better is really very clear. It doesn't, I'm not sure at all that the tiny minority of people that we help, first of all, are truly helped. Yeah, because there's so much idiot ideology obscuring this and so much self-deception and narcissism on the part of the people who are doing it and undertaking it, that we don't have clear data, but what we bloody well do know, is that a huge number of people who are doing this have been pulled into a psychogenic fad and then are undergoing unbelievably dangerous hormonal transformation, cuz hormones are no joke. They are powerful physiological agents. And then the surgery itself is, well, it couldn't it. If the only way it could be more brutal in a fundamental sense as if it was done without anesthetic, right? This is not something you waltz into for one day. And, and, and then like it's a minor modification of some trivial element of your identity. These are life Changes, procedures. It is as well. You know, that you can go through the opposite sex puberty or that, you know, the Wilder reaches of the, the trans lobby will talk about things like putting all children on puberty blockers until we grow up enough that we decide which puberty we want to undergo. And I mean, I, I was brought up Catholic. I'm no longer a believer at all, but I, I listen to this and I just think that's, that's demonic actually. It's, it's the hell of a thing for ex-Catholic to say. Yeah. You know? Yeah. But I don't think so to say that to children, to give children that idea. I think, you know, whoever whosoever mislead one of these children, you know, it's the worst thing you can do and they do over Time. Well, so, well, so let me ask you about this then. You know, one of the things that I have noticed is that people tend to come to religious convictions, not so much when they discover the nature of good, but when they discover the nature of evil and the reality of evil and you call, you know, you described yourself as a lapsed Catholic, let's say, but you've been talking about the battle that's been happening right now in religious and theological terms. And I think that indicates the depth of the battle. And then also making the case that while the willingness to sacrifice children, to the dictates of a narcissistic ideology, borders on the demonic, it's pretty strong language for someone who's not religious. And so one of the things I've been concerned about is that when God dies to use the Nietzche and phrase that, and we no longer attribute to God, what is God's and attribute to Caesar? What is Caesars? We start to attribute to Caesar what is God's and that contaminates the political with the religious. And so I think that even if you're a secularist, you have to start to understand if you're sophisticated, that some elements of the axioms of perception and cognition themselves are so deep. They're so fundamental that they're outside the realm of the political. They might even be outside the realm of the philosophical they're down in the realm of the sacred and that's that you're okay. Okay. So why, why, what given your lapsed Catholic state let's say it it's weird, right? Cuz there's this, there's this ambivalence in, in your conceptualization. I, I don't want, I don't feel ambivalence Agnostic about this, but okay. Okay. So I'd like to hear about, about That. So I don't describe myself as a lapsed Catholic because really I just don't believe at all anymore, but the reason I don't believe is that I don't think it's true. It's not because I can't feel the emotional and spiritual content of what's being said. It's that? I think if it's factually false and maybe that just shows my lack of poetry and imagination as a human being, but I can't get past it anyway. However, I do think that there is something sacred in the creation of a new life by a couple and a mother who grows a baby for nine months, I've done it twice. It was, it's not something that you could or should talk about in monetary or financial or economic terms, or even in OSA, everyday terms. It's something extraordinary. It's, it's a miracle in secular terms. You you've, you've done something miraculous. And then children are such precious little things. You know, like I feel that as a mother, I feel it as a sister of eight younger siblings and as now an aunt to 19 children, you know, it's, it's not something that we should treat so lightly. And I, because I was brought up Catholic as an Irish Catholic, the language that I turned to, I have no other language to use for how seriously I take the wrong. That is being done. Look in my, in my clinical practice. It was always the case that when I was dealing with the most fundamental catastrophes of people's lives or the most profound experiences of their lives, that the language would automatically become religious. Yes. And that was the case. Even if the people that I were was talking to were explicitly a religious or secularist. And the reason for that is that we actually have a domain of deep language. And when we fall into the domain of deep language, we are in the domain of the sacred. And I've been trying to think about that technically. So imagine this, you know, we have this notion of literary depth, right? Some stories are shallow, some stories are deep. Okay. And everyone feels that. And everyone pretty much accepts the fact that same with music, the same with beauty, any art form there's shallow aspects. And there are deep aspects and deep aspects move you. Yes. And they move you deeply. So they have emotional residents and they call to you as well. Right. They call you to a better version of yourself and part of the depth. So imagine that the deeper an idea is, is precisely proportionate to the number of other ideas that, that I, that depend on that idea. Right? And so then as we move down into the depths and we start talking about, well, the category of sex, for example, or that, that stellar purity and attractiveness of children, which you really see, if you can see children, you're way down in the depths. When you see that that's how children reward you for having them, right, is that there's such a responsibility and such a miracle at the same time, that the miracle of the relationship that you can have with them, amply, repays you for the responsibility. If you're, if you can only see it, but then you have to go down into the depths and take that relationship as a sacred reality and, and ethical requirement. And yeah, you deal with those things casually at your great peril. And, and it's funny. I mean, I said that you don't use the language of economics about them, but I mean, there is something I often think, and I say it in a jokey way, but I'm completely serious too. I mean, a child is the ultimate non fungible. Good. Right? So fungible things are the things that it doesn't matter, which one, it is one gold piece of gold bullying is the same as another one barrel of oil is the same as another one. Child is not the same as another. And if you lose a child, you can't replace that child. So why is that? Like, why do we feel like that? Well, obviously in, in my opinion, evolution gave it to us. A religious person might conceive of that differently, but the feeling is the same. And I find now in ways that before I found this topic, I have fruitful and interesting to me, at least conversations with religious people because they take this seriously to them. You know, they feel a sense of awe at gold. Well, right. That of a, well, what you see, I think when you have a relationship with a child, your own child in particular, cuz you can see them most clearly in some real sense is that you see the manifestation of the image of God. I mean, to me, it's the it's it's evolution is the thing that did that. But evolution gives me that that's sense of awe. You know, you don't it's, it's not something you treat lightly. It's not something that isn't miraculous. And this seems like maybe we've gone off topic a lot, but I think it's why mothers and people who care about child protection or among the people who are most disturbed by what's happening here. Because if you take children seriously, and if you take the task of creating a world in which little human beings can turn into healthy, whole responsible, good adults who can live full rounded, satisfying lives that are not just good for themselves, but good for the other people around them. You know, that's again, I have to turn to the sacred language, like this is a sacred task and to see people so willfully tell small children lies like that. You can be either sex if you want, or that sex is a spectrum or that we were assigned a sex at birth or that some people are non-binary or that if you, you know, if when you're seven, you decide that you're really a boy, you'll just go on puberty blockers and take testosterone and there'll be a little operation. And I, I feel livid at these people really livid. Yeah. I, I feel exactly the same. Well, hence my banning from Twitter, let's say, and I've taken a lot of flack about that, you know, and people tell me, well, you were so mean to Ellen page. And I think, well, you know, Ellen page is a star and she advertised her transformation and made the claim that this has revolutionized her life. And then she displayed her new body in a public forum and got 1.7 million Instagram likes for it and probably enticed. Well, let's say one young girl who's confused into becoming sterile, which is one too many for me, but it could be as many as what, a hundred, 500 a thousand. And I have my tendency to feel a hell of a lot more, sorry for a set of confused, isolated and lonely pubescent girls who have no one to love them enough to help them appreciate who they are than I do for one overprivileged. And unfortunately confused narcissistic Hollywood star. Yeah. I feel the same. I mean, I don't particularly want to say anything about Ellen page. I think you've said, you've said enough. You said it. No, no, I wasn't gonna say I was gonna say, you've said it clearly enough. I would just depersonalize it. And I would say that it's back to the narcissism, the focus on one person at the expense of everybody else. So that's one of the things that's most remarkable about this movement is, you know, there are many people who are suffering or underprivileged or vulnerable, or indeed like really, really, really hard done by like a colleague of mine once said to me, why are we not talking about the CDs? Why are we not talking about child abuse victims? Why is the suffering trans person or the, the UNT transitioned trans child, the Marty figure of all and almost a Yeah. Well that's what we're trying to figure out. Eh. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, and why, if you know, why is it as if to, to, to sort out that child's like the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody to feel gender dysphoria? I think most people feel gender dysphoria in some respect, why to sort that out, will we sacrifice any number of other people? Well, It's a form of narcissistic self consciousness. I mean, and everyone does feel that for sure. And I think they feel that most acutely at puberty. I mean, people are, well, we know we're mortal. We know our flaws, we know we're going to die. We know we aren't canonical examples of our sex that we could be much better in a thousand ways than we are. We all have to bear that burden. And so that dysphoria that's mortality dysphoria and it can manifest itself in all sorts of ways and that's part and parcel of the human condition. But to entice young people into assuming that radical surgical transformation is the sure cure for that is, well, I also believe that it borders on the demonic. I compared the people who are doing psych, doing transformation surgery on, on minors to people who sacrifice children to MOOC. And I do see it in exactly the same way. And the weird thing about having done that, you know, this is so strange too, is that almost all the comments I got for that article, from the Telegraph and also on my YouTube channel, almost all of them were supportive. Yeah. Way more than I thought there would be. And I thought, well, if everyone agrees that this is wrong, why the hell are we doing it? I mean, forced consciousness. People believe that other people don't agree with them. I mean, that is one of the purpose of conversations. Like this is to show people that you can actually say these things. And I mean, it hasn't been easy for either you or me and we have had significant blow. Let's Talk, let's talk about that. I wanna know, like I know what happened to me. Yeah. When you wrote this book, what happened to you? I mean, not as much as might have because my employer isn't a coward. So it turns out that you don't need very much bravery to stand up to these people because the viciousness gets worse if you give in in any way, way. Oh yeah. Yeah. You've seen that. You've seen that if somebody says something and then they apologize, they just come after you with a double ferocity. So I don't think that the editor of the economist agreed with me at least at first, but she doesn't like bullies and she does like free speech. And so the first people who tried to get me fired, she told them sharpish where to put it. Okay. So you had employer support. Yes. Employer support is very important. I, I often think about what happens to people in this social media age and in particular, those of us who talk on trans issues, but also those who talk on race issues as being the modern form of the pillar. So you're, you're shame. You're shamed rather than injured. You're not, you're not hanged or crucified. You're, you're specifically shamed. That's the aim. And it's done in a way. So as to maximize the fear that other people feel that they will also suffer the same fate, because there's nothing they can do to help you. If you're brought to the pilly, like if, if a woman is brought to the pilly, let's just say a woman, cuz I'm a woman. Another woman could go and stand by her to show solidarity, but it wouldn't do her any good. She too would be shamed. Then it would just mean that there were two, a casts instead of one. So then you think like, what do you do to end the pilly? It's not mass solidarity actually. It's, it's powerful people. You, if you are under the protection of somebody with social capital, you wouldn't, you wouldn't suffer this fate. This was for the outcasts. So it's actually the job of employers and institutions to stand up here. You mean rather than to censor for example. Yes. But, and you don't have to say very much like Kathleen stocks, university did eventually say some good things about free speech, but she had been going for three years and they had said nothing. If the first time they attacked her, the university had said very clearly we support free speech. We support academic freedom. We do not tolerate attacks on our staff. I guarantee you, the mob would've gone elsewhere, straight away. Instead it was made clear that she was available to be brought to the Hillary. So I didn't have that. Okay. So then next question is, why do you think what has changed that has made our institutions so utterly cowardly in the face of the narcissistic minority mob, cuz something's changed. It wasn't like this 10 years ago, you could see it a bit. It certainly wasn't like this 20 years ago. So is it, is it, do you think it, is it fundamentally the power that social media has brought to the, to the obsessively and narcissistically outraged minority? Or what do you think it is? Yeah. So I think that plays a part, but the thing is your employer can do the same thing about social media. They can just put out a short statement saying we stand by Helen Joyce or Kathleen stalker, whoever it is. She's an excellent journalist journalist or she's an excellent academic move on and they move on. They really do move on. So it's the, it's the fact that institutions haven't learned to deal with social media. They think they have to engage. I dunno why they do that. It's stupid. I've seen it repeatedly. Okay. So I have a hypothesis about that. Okay. You tell me what you think of this. Well look, if you're a conservative type, you tend to be conscientious. Yeah. The conscientious people tend to be guilt prone because they, they want to be seen to do their duty and they wanna do their duty. And so what that means is that if you're, if you're a narcissist and a mob of 30 torch bearing neighbors show up on your doorstep and tell you that you're shameful, you don't care. Cuz you're a narcissist. You're low in conscientiousness. You're parasitic, you're disagreeable. You could care less. What other people think? And so the mob has no effect on you, but if you're conscientious and 30 people show up, then you're gonna think, well, 30 people wouldn't be on my doorstep. If I hadn't maybe done something wrong and I'm not perfect. And so maybe I should scour my conscience and you know, repent of my sins publicly because well, why would I presume I'm right when I know I'm imperfect, that works really well on conscientious people. And now with, with the social media networks, a mob from anywhere in the world can aggregate itself. And even if it's one person in a million, who's annoyed at you, if a hundred million people are watching, then a hundred people can show up on your doorstep with torches and pitchforks. And so I think that this guilt targeting that the narcissistic psychopaths use in social media is particularly effective on decent conservative, traditional people. And so they need to learn that we're not in Kansas anymore. Things are not the way they work. Yeah. You know, if you prepared for it, if you know it's coming. So I think the economist, because it's very America focused, but it's still a very British publication. I think it had a couple of years notice that things were different. And so when these started, you know, they, they were, they were prepared because it's how you it's, it's the first thing you do. That's catastrophic. If you make a misstep on the very first thing, then it's very hard to regain it because they know that you'll give way you've proved it. So they will never leave you alone. Yeah. Well I noticed for a while, I've been subscribing to the economist forever, such a great magazine. And I noticed over the last six or seven years that an alarming degree of wokeness had crept into its hello hallways. And then I noticed about three years ago that the tide had turned and that people had woken up. So to speak to some degree at the economist and started to push back against a fair bit of this nonsense. And I was so relieved about that. And so I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's commensurate with your experience there, but thank God. There are some institutions that still have the ability to stand up and say no like a, like a firm and caring parent. Let's say, I, I, I shouldn't really comment on my own employer. Who've been very good to me. So, you know, I still hold fast to some of those older values of discretion and loyalty and so on that are so easy for the modern identitarian narcissist to hijack and to use against you. So I think that's another thing that we're seeing. We're seeing the rise of the toxic underling. I call it in my mind, you know, we all know about what toxic bosses are like, like a toxic boss can ruin everybody's experience in an entire workplace, but that's like a, that's like a right wing toxicity in that it's the, it's the toxicity that's enabled by authority, chain of command, loyalty discretion, obedience, you know, these values that are good and bad of the, of the right wing. And now you imagine you've got a toxic underling. Who's somebody who's completely convinced of their own rightness. Who's junior. Who's willing to tell any lies in the service of what they see as the greater good who have no loyalty whatsoever who think that the institution is irre, remedially sexist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, everything, phobic and who think that it's their job to, to, you know, to fight from the bottom up. And then what I was going to say, the second thing that stands along social media as the enabling factor in all of this is the rise of the DEI industry, diversity equity and inclusion. Oh yes. And the thing is, if you were living in the old world, if we were still living in Kansas, that would not be too bad because yes. Okay. We could have some more diversity. That'd be great. You know, equity's not a bad thing in itself and I don't want to exclude anybody of course, but we're not in Kansas. We're living in a new world where everything is upside down. And so within that world, DEI is weaponized and it creates this Underland phenomenon whereby just some junior person can cause an entire organization to have a meltdown by claiming, you know, phobias of various sorts. And by taking to social media to talk about it and bosses don't feel like they can say, that's ridiculous. You know, out of you're going to talk about us like that because if they do, they'll be told that they're racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, everything else. Right. But you know what? Well, but there is a, there is an unbelievable amount of self delusional cowardice in that too, because oh yes. You can say to those people, there was a rebellion at penguin random house when the news came out that they were going to publish my new book. Oh, I read about you On order. Yeah. Yeah. And, and my daughter and I are a response to penguin was, Hey, look, you got six or seven employees here in the greatest publishing house in the world. And they just told you, they're perfectly willing to ban books. They haven't read and then have a meltdown about it. Hey, they just told you who you should fire. Why don't you fire them? And the answer was, well, we can't do that. It's like, well, not only can you do that. You are actually morally obliged to do that because they showed you in the deepest possible way that their values, which were narcissistically sensorial were at 100% odds with yours. The trick is to not hire those people. Like not even to have them come in and prove to you that they should never have been hired. And there've been a few really interesting articles about these meltdowns that I've read in the past few weeks. And there was a sort of a, just a, just a couple of sentences that were by the, by in one of them. And it was an, it was a lot of employee of them employers, especially in Washington, in the NGO and nonprofit and charitable sector, you know, and they were saying how they can get no work done anymore, but they just can do nothing. The entire organization is tied up in these terminable slack channel, just conversations about, you know, how they need to rearrange everything. And they're not actually doing their charitable or their nonprofit mission anymore. They they've stopped being mission focused at all. And one of them said, we realize belatedly that we have suffered less than some other people because, and he didn't mention who it was. We have someone on staff who a year or two ago was caught up in one of these horrendous social media dragons. And so the social justice warriors won't apply to work here. So they, they were kind of inoculated against it. So I think that's strict to work at how you don't hire these people. And I think it's by stating your values really, really clearly, and that those values must be outward facing. They must be to do with your mission, that the mission comes first and that everybody is expected to sign up. Well, that's also a reflection of the belief in that underlying ontological reality, right? We actually have a job to do. Yes, it's a job in the real world and it's of paramount importance. And what you, if you don't feel like that job is worth doing, then this isn't the job for you. All right. Well, we're coming up at the end of our half hour or hour and a half. I'm going to continue talking about these issues with Helen on the daily wire plus channel. We're going to actually go into the details of the development of her career and, and expand that into a philosophical discussion. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on daily wire plus dot. |
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