Not transphobic, just opposed to surgery and hormone therapy.

the primary question that's been asked
about transgenderism as a challenge the political status quo is the question of how can we be a tolerant society with the question of who we is being quite a bit different in a Christian society in a Muslim society and in the predominantly secular atheist liberal and libertine societies that exist here and there around the world that question however is a little bit too easy and maybe misleading and some of its answers especially we turn to the much tougher issues of gender reassignment surgery and hormone replacement therapy I think we have a problem right now in the year 2020 and I think this is a problem that's gonna solve itself of basically treating transgender people with the soft bigotry of low expectations I did not coin that phrase um when we look at the discourse scientific as well as political surrounding women's breast augmentation so heterosexual biological women women born as women who choose to have breast implants you'll find right now in the earth 2020 there's both skepticism and real concern about disease and disability caused by breast implants some of those illnesses are still matters of scientific speculation but some are not when women with breast implants complain that they have trouble breathing that they have trouble sleeping that they have trouble using their shoulder joint and arm with the full range of motion that they had before the surgery those are scientifically completely self explanatory problems and they've been studied I know by the US military because the US military now has enough women in service that some of those women have new breast augmentation surgery while they were in the US military and then some of those women can't do the same tasks that used to do before they had the surgery so you can imagine this is like the ultimate research project for kinesiology how does this actually impair women's ability to I don't know lift heavy objects perform certain kinds of routine tasks in the Army routinely if when a woman a heterosexual biologically normal woman born as a woman if if we're gonna start issuing really stern warnings to women about the risks they're taking the possible lifetime of disease and disability they're signing up for when they choose to get breast augmentation why is it that these questions are not being asked these warnings are not being made as soon as breast augmentation is attached to the political aspirations of transgenderism now I say again I am genuinely sincerely interested in pursuing a society in which transgender people are tolerated and because I have the experience of living in Thailand and Laos two of the most trans positive societies on earth I believe they are the two most trans positive societies they're very brief digression you know when I was there males who dressed as females were allowed to enroll in university as females and live in female quarters all kinds of government paperwork official positions in life you were allowed to declare your gender and live as that gender and so on and just in daily life everywhere at all ages you saw transgender people living among the elderly and among teenagers and among middle-aged people in normal jobs participating in society and in the most recent elections in Thailand there were quite a few transgender candidates and has to be said they were not treated in a sort of freakshow manner I mean society there didn't freak out like oh can you believe there's a there's a man dressed as a woman running for no it was normal it was recognized okay this is a transgender female person went in for election there and then their political views were interrogated to that extent like any other candidate so the normalization of transgender people the tolerance of chancery of gender people and then progressing towards a society where there meaningful equal participants in that society at selling I'm I'm genuinely interested in however I don't think that should come at the price of dismissing the real health impacts of breast implant surgery and as you know this is not the only surgery now I only mentioned so far the the mechanical aspects of how breast augmentation impacts women's health obviously just the fact that breast augmentation can ruin your quality of sleep again keep in mind whether you are sleeping on your back or sleeping on your side having plastic bags full of silicone inserted under your skin sometimes under a layer of muscle to in your chest it's going to impair your breathing it's going to impair how you feel when you're lying to sleep it's very obvious that this could deteriorate your quality of sleep and many women who have the surgery complain of it and many women say that's one of the reasons for having the fake breast root the deterioration of your quality of sleep can lead to the deterioration of your emotional condition your intellectual condition in every way I mean I have to say for myself I'm still sick right now I've been sick and injured for almost 30 days solid now since December 17th up in Sec and the main impact on my mental acuity and emotional state is not the illness itself it's the lack of sleep that comes as a consequence than once so that already is really much more serious than people want to pretend it is impaired breathing again as these knock-on effects but most of what has gotten newspaper headlines lately is what's called breast implant illness we're talking about an immune system reaction to the presence of stim plants that then can lead to joint pain and an amazing array of seemingly illnesses seemingly lacking an etiology but it seems that and again there's some scientific speculation here it seems that these things are a result of the immune system attacking the breast implants and then confusion with the immune system leading to attacking their joints so on and so forth so if you have a sexual identity if you have a political movement that is premise on denying the the very real medical disadvantages of surgical intervention then youyou have a political movement that is bad for the health of its own adherence and you have a very strange widening gulf between the sort of get tough attitude of medical doctors when they're talking to heterosexual women about this procedure breast augmentation and when they're talking to men who are wanting to become male to female transgender people in transition now under the heterosexual women category just note you may be imagining someone who is just out of vanity getting breast augmentation medical doctors today in 2020 have to have very very tough conversations with women who have lost their breast to breast cancer who may have scars on their chest from breast cancer and they may have very tough conversations with women who've had car accidents you know there are so many car accidents that yes it's common enough to have an injury to your chest in a car accident where women may be wanting breast augmentation just to try to recover a sense of normalcy after an accident like that as you know scarified or damaged their their chest their appearance in that way and you can imagine no difficulty to be a doctor to say look here are the advantages and disadvantages with breast augmentation here are the short term and long term concerns for how this can destroy your health and really destroy your quality of life and then to say look even if really it would make you feel better about yourself if it would alleviate some dysphoria you have about your appearance because a woman who survived breast cancer so on that dysphoria may be very real and very intense maybe the best thing for you to do is to refuse nevertheless to have this breast augmentation procedure now when you turn to hormones we live in a very peculiar era when government guidelines are in flux on the issue of foreign hormones I travel all around the world partly because of my divorce when I go to visit my daughter I go to various countries in Europe some countries I passed through allow the private sector to advertise testosterone as if it were hair dye as if they were just saying to middle-aged men hey you have some gray hairs try out hair dye make you feel young again make you feel better original there are some countries where testosterone and hormone supplementation of this kind in a completely for-profit way is being advertised and of course the side effects the risk for your health are minimized or dismissed there are other countries where obviously this is illegal or being regulated and within just last few years as you probably know there have been very sudden shifts in how a technology like vaping which is to say the ingestion of nicotine through vapor how that is and isn't allowed to be advertised and promoted and how it is and isn't allowed to be done so I think right now in the year 2020 we maybe have not yet come to the point where the controversy over the use of hormones including on a mass scale men using testosterone booster unnecessarily where we haven't yet come to a state of alarm and debate about it in the way that people are now alarmed about and debating silicone implants breast augmentation surgery but that day is inevitably going to come I've seen just to transgender youtubers speak openly about the really negative impacts that hormone replacement therapy had in their lives and I just wanna clarify these are not X transgender people they are people hoody transition these are transgender people who transitioned both surgically and through hormone closure and who have continued their transition there so their overall happy with their transition but nevertheless they came on YouTube and made videos really warning that this completely destroyed their sex drive and had absolutely horrible effects on their mood now likewise with heterosexual men men who are born as men biological men using testosterone booster in the short term the dangers and disadvantage of this may not be obvious but you put yourself in a situation where long term you can never know you can never be confident with your own testosterone levels you may never be able to return to relying on your body's own production of testosterone and you could have a series of nagging minor but nevertheless soul-destroying health problems that then haunt you until the day you die because you destroyed your body's ability to produce and control natural levels of hormones this is not a minor or trivial thing now the outward physical effect of the use of hormone booster hormone supplementation is obvious to everyone it was especially obvious to me when I went to a gym in China this is when I was living in Kunming China I was veg pressing over 200 pounds so I think sometimes 200 pounds I was 250 pounds it's not it's not a lot of white guys it's really not but I was surrounded by Chinese guys who really had a sort of movie star or bill-to had much more much more puffy muscles than I did and some of them were bench pressing 25% of the weight I was pitch pressing so I'm I'm bench pressing over 200 pounds at their bench pressing a little more than 50 pounds you know I just couldn't believe it they were lifting so little weight and getting these results and of course the the of course they could be on various performance-enhancing drugs but the most likely suspect is testosterone boosters testosterone supplementation you know this is the desired effect that men are lining up and paying for but the other effects the effect on ego mood behavior your sense of happiness or unhappiness your sense of frustration your sense of anger these things are really scary they're really terrifying to deal with that in some sense you're not just tampering with your appearance you are tampering with your very soul I don't say that as an exaggeration I've had some female friends none of these women were really my girlfriends or wives but I've had some female friends who really suffered extreme mood changes when their period came around so you know once a month and you know I really was aware of it there were women I spent time with and it seemed like their whole character changed their whole emotional character their whole intellectual character change for those few days when they suffered through that hormonal state well what you're doing your body when you take exogenously eyes performed sensing drugs or in order to effect a gender transition is you're throwing your body into a hormonal crisis that is in no way evolved to cope with as difficult as it may be for women for some women at least to cope with the monthly hormonal cycle with administration and as difficult as it may be for some women to cope with menopause those are hormonal states we have millions of years of evolution rehearsing we have practice on an evolutionary scale coping with those they're within the normal range of states that we could we can cope with as a man if you tinker with that whether for the purposes of making yourself look more masculine shall we say or for the purposes of making yourself look more feminine you're rolling the dice in a way you're taking a risk where again apart from the you know simple medically documented illnesses that may be brought about when when you lose your temper as a man when you lose control would you want to live with the nagging doubt that maybe you did that maybe you acted that way maybe you felt that way because of the steroids you're on because the testosterone boost your own because of the the drugs you're using and when you tamper with your hormone levels this is a mood altering drug that doesn't just affect you for a few hours of the day it's not it's not like taking cocaine for example this is something that is going to affect the way you see and feel 24 hours a day every day in the case of transgender people use these hormones for a long long time they may be planning on doing it for the rest of their lives so given that there is a real sense of seriousness with which we advise our own sons you may be advising your brother or uncle or grandfather to be really really careful about messing with their hormone levels even if this can offer you the body of your dreams let's say a sudden increase in muscle mass and what-have-you and there's no doubt by the way the science facts that up also taking testosterone booster as a man can dramatically alter your physique with very minimal effort at the gym or if you have a son who wants to transition and gender shouldn't there be some really sincere discussion here of the disadvantages and as I say just now just in the last couple months I've heard a couple of transgender youtubers coming out and speaking about the fact that hey from their experience in one case she said that it was the complete end of her sex drive as you feel no sexual desire at all that this was like in her words she called it quote a chemical castration close quote so this is a really traumatic really serious change in your character and your behavior and how you feel and how you perceive the world and just like the bodybuilder you're taking on that risk you know to change your appearance and again my interest with transgenderism politically is just how to have a society that tolerates these people and then works well and having lived in Thailand and Laos I already know it's pretty easy to have a society that in this way can be tolerant and work well we can all get along I would say this transgender people do not present a challenge to society even to the same extent that religious people do in as much as many religious people for example want to have arranged marriage arranged marriage is actually very deep and difficult to handle challenge to our social norms should you allow parents to choose to their their children get married to at any age mmm this is not that's probably not something we can tolerate as a society proudly you know we need to intervene and say no no no children have to choose their own partners by the way that was a huge political struggle in communist China China also had a tradition of arranged marriage and the government had to intervene and say no children have to choose who their contemporary themselves and it's still it's still a struggle in Chinese culture less today than it was 50 years ago obviously so I mean the the challenge of accepting and tolerating and including transgender people I think that's relatively easy all right but in as much as the transgender movement attaches itself dogmatically to the defense of and the advancement of hormone replacement therapy at all costs or breast augmentation surgery at all costs or other potentially are actually debilitating surgeries treatments or what-have-you at all costs then they they put themselves in a position where they're going to need to examine an answer very very difficult questions very high level of scrutiny you know in terms of the consequences for their own members their own adherence for their health for their ability to really leave bleed positive and thriving lives now with all this haven't been said let's close with a brief statement about the demon that justifies all these things that brings about a halt to all further rational inquiry or debate and that is the demon of dysphoria what many transgender activists will tell you at least in casual discussions is that any suffering is justified whether it's the suffering of literally cutting your penis off or it's the suffering of in the case of female to male various hormonal treatments surgeries that cut the breasts off so on and so forth that the suffering of various forms of body modification hormone replacement therapy in zone that all of this is justified because the experience of dysphoria is so terrible is so challenging for them it's really worthwhile to look up the etymology of the word dysphoria and you'll find that the word really has no meaning more specific than misery people do experience misery with their own bodies they really do but I'd like you to imagine for a moment the position of a medical doctor who's approached by an 18 year old girl eighteen year old young woman biological woman born as woman an 18 year old who comes in and says she's unhappy with her body and she wants the doctor to give her breast implant surgery right now in the year 2020 you can imagine there is a kind of moral onus on the doctor to say to this one woman young woman look you're 18 years old now maybe right now you feel this is your top priority in life but here are the risks here are the disadvantages here are the long-term consequences this can bring about your life and you know what the other thing is when you're 28 years old you might not care about this as much as you do right now you might think right now that at age 18 having this surgery that's gonna change your appearance it's really gonna mean so much to you positively but you know what as you get older and more mature and gain another perspective you might you might regret it later just for that reason because you might look back on your 18 year old self and feel that this was an immature decision apart from the very real disadvantages to your health that I've just mentioned you might also say to this 18 year old girl you know you might want to join the army one day you might want to play a sport one day that you know having breast augmentation surgery who really puts you at a disadvantage for you know significantly apart from all the other problems we've we've just mentioned I think there really would be a kind of moral onus on the doctor to talk this through and this is just talking about a heterosexual young woman who wants to present press toget issue that raises how much greater is the onus on a doctor to talk to an 18 year old young man who says he wants exactly the same surgery so that he can transition from being perceived in public as a man to being perceived in public as a woman the disadvantages are tremendous a doctor who today in the year 2020 has an 18 year-old boy come in 18 year old young man heterosexual born biological male and he says to the doctor that he's unhappy with his body he says the doctor he feels dysphoria when he looks in the mirror because he's skinny and he has no muscles and he's tried so hard to gain muscles at the gym he's made all these efforts he wants the doctor to prescribe him testosterone booster okay there must be thousands of doctors every month who have this kind of situation and you know what the skinny 18 year old guy and the flat-chested 18 year old girl they probably could go to a psychiatrist or psychotherapist who would write a formal letter to the surgeon saying officially this teenager experiences dysphoria this girl when she sees herself in the mirror and she's flat-chested feels dysphoria this 18 year old guy he's really attached to the notion that you got to have more muscles better physical development and he really experiences dysphoria and you know what we could add a sympathetic note to either example maybe both of these kids the flat-chested girl and the guy with poor muscles let's say both of them survived a car accident that really made it very difficult for them to develop physically they have some kind of injury or illness that made their struggle to be physically normal or physically attractive all the more psychological principle the world is full of examples like that dysphoria is not unique to the transgender experience and I think it's very difficult to trace out what it would or would not justify now this particular 18 year old girl who comes to the doctor and says this you know there are alternatives there are alternatives to getting breast implant surgery and one of the alternatives is also simply to wear a padded bra you know and there may be ways in which that's somewhat humiliating or challenging or inconvenient or you don't know if you want to live with it it's like I can understand that all right I really can but I think if you look at the known risks the known disadvantages of breast augmentation surgery and the fact that this would be a decision you're making that changes the rest of your life irrevocably unlike hair dye you can choose to dye your hair and later get a new haircut I think any doctor would probably be commended for taking the time to say that young woman well maybe you should think about a non-surgical approach to this so I make this video at a time when I've had contact with just a few people who were transgender but who were themselves struggling to find a voice in the transgender movement to define themselves as transgender but opposed to surgery to define themselves as transgender but skeptical about hormones or as outright opposed to hormones and those people may end up having to adopt a new political identity or even a new gender identity because what they encounter again and again is the hostility of transgender people who are deeply committed to justifying the surgery and justifying the hormone therapy as a core part of their political identity as well as being part of their gender identity this is a debate that in the next 20 years in the Western world is yet to unfold