When I learned that little gender nonconforming, sweet little boys were being told that they were girls, tomboys were being told that they were boys. Adolescents were having body parts chopped off. And because of this belief, that was when it became a true fixation, a true obsession. there was nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong. They they got a tiny technicality and the, the publisher was just it was just cowardice. Of course, they they were afraid of trans activists. And then in June 2024, we got just a tiny taste of how unbelievably fraudulent and corrupt WPATH is and the the revelations were so damning. It was the bombshell. So that's the first problem, is that it's a field of medicine that is in no way grounded in evidence, in the scientific process, in anything like a medical, an ethical standpoint of do no harm. if the godfather of evidence based medicine says that gender affirming care for young people is medically necessary, again, the appeal to authority people are going to believe that because his name carries weight and he carelessly, and it's an act of cowardice as well, he just capitulated to trans activists. Hello and welcome to Awake at the Wheel. So in today's episode, we're going to revisit some themes surrounding gender ideology, gender medicine, as well as social contagion. We're going to be doing this today with our guest, Mia Hughes. So Mia is an Ottawa based British journalist and researcher who is the director of Genspect Canada, as well as a senior fellow at the MacDonald LaurierInstitute. As well as the author of the WPATH files. Much of Mia's work has focused on pediatric gender medicine as well as social contagion and policy analysis. So welcome Mia. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for being here today. So to start out with, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about your professional background and how you got to where you are? Yeah, mine's a really quite a strange story. There are lots of strange stories, I think, in the gender war. Mine's one of the strangest. So I was a teacher. I was well, I was a teacher then. I was a stay at home mother, three children, and then I. Well, I was on the left politically. I was embarrassingly woke, but not really, truly woke, but definitely had some silly beliefs or accepted silly beliefs without thinking them through. And then on December 19th, 2019, JK Rowling tweeted in support of Maya Forstater and it was just a very mildly worded tweet about, you know, dress however you like all the rest of it. And Twitter exploded. Twitter was aflame, calling her a TERF and people were being awful. So much abuse towards J.K. Rowling and I read the tweet and I thought, I agree with it. And so therefore I realized, oh my God, I'm a Terf. And I knew that these terfs were like supposed to be evil people. For anyone who doesn't know, a Terf is a trans exclusionary radical feminist. Most terfs most people who have that label applied to them are neither trans exclusionary nor radical feminist. It's a slur aimed at silencing women. And so on that day, I realized, oh my God, I'm a TERF And then I just started to read the threads underneath JK's tweet, and I saw lesbians fighting with trans activists, and the lesbians were saying, you know, there's no such thing as a lesbian with a penis. And the trans activists were getting really angry with the lesbians. And I thought, what is going on? Male lesbians, men and women? I didn't really think that anyone thought trans women are women when they said over and over, trans women are women, trans are women, I didn't think anyone really meant it. I just thought we were all pretending that these men were women. And so on that day, I figured out I was confused and baffled. But I also became obsessed with it, and I just started reading as much as I could. I discover my life changed forever when I discovered what was happening to adolescents in gender clinics. When I learned that we were telling children they could be born in the wrong body. When I learned that little gender nonconforming, sweet little boys were being told that they were girls, tomboys were being told that they were boys. Adolescents were having body parts chopped off. And because of this belief, that was when it became a true fixation, a true obsession. And then I read everything I could to make sense of how that could possibly be happening. And as I was reading, I just started tweeting. I had maybe four followers. Three of them were probably bots. But I just started tweeting about the things that I was reading that were making sense to me, and my account grew really quickly. So I eventually started working for the Post Millennial. They offered me a job based on a Twitter thread. I was covering gender full time for them. Then, based on another Twitter thread, Michael Shellenberger offered me a job writing for him at public. So I went there. And then as soon as I started covering gender for Michael Shellenberger, somebody gave him what is now known as the Path Files, which is a stack of. It was a stack of leaked internal communications from the world professionals Association for Transgender Health. And he gave them to me. And I wrote a report which was just telling the story of WPATH to to anyone in the gender debate. It wasn't new information, it was WATH members being WPATH members. But the point of the path files. What Michael and I did together is we told the story of path, and then we got it outside of the bubble of Terf Twitter. We got it into a more mainstream audience. And then from there, I took a senior fellowship at the McDonald Laurier Institute, which is here in Ottawa. The reason I did that is because I felt it was time that I focused all of my efforts on Canada, the US. There's plenty of people speaking about this, writing about this, you know, Canada, there were very few. So I moved to the McDonald Laurier Institute, and then I launched and spoke Canada as well for the same reason. So looking back on your career as a teacher, were there moments back then that you can reflect on where you're like, wait a minute, something's not quite right? Or were you a teacher at a time where this wasn't as prevalent? It wasn't a thing because I became I became a stay at home mother in 2009, and I'd like to bit off topic, but I'd like to stress that I all the way through my adolescence, I was the I will never want children type. I will actually be never in my life. Worst possible thing that could ever have happened was to get pregnant. I will never want children. So, you know, if you'd offered me at age 14 tubal ligation. Absolutely. I'd have taken it because I'll never want children. And then when I hit 30, somebody, something snapped inside me. Someone flipped a switch and baby fever hit me so hard I had to have a baby right away. I had three children. And then I didn't just become a mother of three. I became a stay at home, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, baby wearing mother of three and I, my children were my entire life. So that's part of why I'm so heavily invested in this is because I know who I was, and I know how sure I was, and I cannot stand the thought of what they are taking away from these these girls, these young people. And so I was a stay at home mother from 2009 for most of a decade. And then when Covid hit, I pulled my children out and I homeschooled them. So then I added another year and a half of being full time homeschooling mother of three. And then I entered the gender war. Okay. So my understanding of your work, Mia, is that it's very much data driven, evidence based, but yet you still experience backlash and doubt from some of the consumers of your, your content. So, can you give us an example of a time where maybe you've been really, really supported with like, data and evidence and yet the backlash so continued. Well, everything I do, but I mean WPATH files was really interesting because w path files, it's I think it's a 50 page report 300 and something citations took me many, many, many months of very intense seven days a week work to produce painstaking fact checking and editing. And it was a very, very long process. And then within 24 hours, I'm not even joking. Within 24 hours that Erin Reid, who is a trans identified man who is one of the most prominent trans activists in the U.S and he calls himself a journalist. I suppose he is in some way he fact check me, he fact check the files within 24 hours, which is an amazing, amazing, remarkable feat. Wow, that's so fast. He found he says he found 216 errors and he's. But he says in his website, but I'm not going to bother telling you what they all are. So it's just like you just pulled a number out thin air and then he shows maybe 10, 12 errors and none of them are errors. It's like the guy has reading comprehension issues clearly, or he's just interpreting my words in the most ungenerous way, thinking that I'm presenting things in a way because I hate his community or whatever, which is not true. I was meticulous, in fact, checking myself. I had a great team fact checking me, and I was very careful in how I worded everything. But the problem is you put that out there. He put that out there within 24 hours. Trans activists just latch on to it. Oh, it's this 216 errors It's absolute garbage. Look, it's been fact checked and it's proven wrong. And they run away with that narrative that's out there now. And anyone who mentions WPATH files in Canada, somebody will undoubtedly show up with Erin Reid with his big red banner. False. Across my WPATH files. So yeah, I mean, it's so the WPATH files CAS report. Okay, there was just one more. There's much to say, darn it, that, where, you know, an objective reading of it would say, oh, my God, this is terrible. Yeah. They all just get wiped out with, you know, these trans activists because that's all that the people see. Oh, the other one, sorry, was Lisa Littman's study on ROGD, right? What’s the narrative? It was debunked. It was taken down. It was, you know, they it was so terrible out there. Yeah. I mean, I've read both versions, and we know that the facts still are the same. It was a bit of verbiage, a bit of, you know, caveats and everything like that, just clarity on terms and, you know, and methodology. Yet the findings were still the same, but still, I, I've heard so many people being in the gender wars for as long as I have that they just take it on faith. Yes, you have been discredited. Me now you're just a hateful Terf, right? You know who just wants to destroy, you know, all trans people. So anyway, I hear you. I, I mean, on Lisa Littman, they did that the there was nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong. They they got a tiny technicality and the, the publisher was just it was just cowardice. Of course, they they were afraid of trans activists. So they, they, they issued a correction. But it was there was nothing wrong with it. They did it again with the next attempt to study ROGD which came years later, because trans activists made everyone afraid of studying this phenomenon. And they got them on a technicality. They got them on the first token technicality, and then that was overruled. So then they moved on to another technicality and then on to another technicality. There's nothing wrong with the research, but it's interesting that you. So WPATH files and CASS, WPATH files was March 2024, CAS was April 2024 and you're right, they do. They do just fling accusations and try and just discredit. But something else happened in 2024 that they've been surprisingly well. Not surprisingly, if you know them, but they've been silent on. And that is in June 2024. We got the the treasure trove of WPATH internal communications from the Alabama legal case, Boe V Marshall. So when Alabama banned restricted access to so-called gender affirming care, the ACLU launched a lawsuit. The attorney general of Alabama did a remarkable, wonderful thing, and he ordered discovery. He's like, okay, you're saying w path our experts and the standards of care are to be trustworthy. Let's see how they formulated these standards of care. They got millions of internal emails of how they did that. And then in June 2024, we got just a tiny taste of how unbelievably fraudulent and corrupt WPATH is and the the revelations were so damning. It was the bombshell. And amazingly or not really amazingly at all. But trans actress didn't touch it, and the reason they didn't touch it is because there's nothing they could do. It's right there, WPATH’s words. What did they do? They commissioned 13 or at least 13 systematic reviews from Johns Hopkins. When they they get the first two, they're starting to show there's no evidence. And Johns Hopkins is saying there's no evidence. So they just buried them. They just blocked publication of independent systematic reviews, and then they went ahead and made that, constructed their guidelines, drew up their guidelines as if the systematic reviews had shown evidence. They also had approved Rachel Levine, Biden's assistant secretary for health, in there, telling them to remove all of the lower age limits in the adolescent chapter because it would hurt the legislation going on at the state level that the Democrats were supporting. So WPATH did that. That's unbelievable fraud, basically criminal. I think they belong in prison, but I don't know if I'll ever get that wish. But the interesting thing is, trans activists didn't touch it because there's no way to spin something so damning. So they just ignored it and hoped that it would go away. And to be honest, nobody in Canada reported on it. It didn't get any mention in Canada. So in Canada, it's as if that never happened. Right? Yeah, it's just incredible. And you know, if someone heard this or someone was watching this in a movie, you know, they would think it's, you know, you got your tinfoil hat on and everything. And they think, this can't happen. And I'm wondering in your in your personal experience, I mean, do you think that a few more people are now hearing that it's happening? A lot more people like it has it hasn't changed. What would you say over the last few years? There is no question that more and more people, even in Canada, understand what this is. I think most people can't possibly grasp the scale of the fraud and corruption. You really do need to put in your 10,000 hours of research to really understand how unbelievably fraudulent and corrupt and criminal this field of medicine is, and how how atrocious this medical scandal is. But the average person on a commonsense level, I think, has probably always understood that this makes no sense. What we're we're blocking the puberty of adolescence based on a self-declared identity. That makes no sense. We're chopping the healthy breasts of seven, 16, 17 year old girls that clearly even. He knew them. And 13 years old. They're kind of der. I mean, the lowest I've heard in Canada is 16 000, yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're the outlier in the US. They're the 13. But I mean, but I mean, I know a 16 year old in Ottawa who had her breasts cut off, at CHEO. Right. And she got affirmed the moment she walked into CHEO as a very confused, depressed, isolated 13 year old girl. And she got put on puberty blockers within 20 minutes. This is happening all over Canada and it's a common it. You don't need to do 10,000 hours of reading to know that that's wrong. And now people are starting to understand that it's happening and they instinctively know that there's something not quite right. And then it's a I like talking about the spiral of silence. You know, we've had this spiral of silence wherein the activists will speak and everybody who has the opposing view, even though they're the majority, they're just silent and afraid to speak. I can tell it's breaking. I can tell it's it's people are starting to find their voice. I talk to Canadians, you know, from all walks of life, everywhere I go, all the time. And they always ask me, what do you do? It's just small talk, right? And I always tell them, and I don't hold back. And they all agree with me because no decent person would disagree with me. No decent person supports chopping the healthy breast of teenage girls, no decent person supports performing irreversible medical interventions on an adolescent because they've got caught up in a cultural fad. No one supports that. But more and more people are openly agreeing with me, and I'm often surprised I had a window. I need a new window. When the window salesman came the other day to give me a quote and I just said, you know, I need to look out the window while I'm writing. And he said, oh, what do you write? I tell them I was like an hour of toughing it out with the window guy. And he was, you know, he no, he knew rather a lot. And he was really quite knowledgeable. So despite that, like widespread acceptance and knowledge and all of that, you just said, from your perspective, then why are people in this system, in the medical institution and so on and so forth pushing this? That's a quite the question, I think. Let me see. It is an entire field of medicine built upon a false belief. And in order to be in this field of medicine, you have to be a true believer in this false belief. So that's the first problem, is that it's a field of medicine that is in no way grounded in evidence, in the scientific process, in anything like a medical, an ethical standpoint of do no harm. It's a field of medicine built on the false belief that people are transgender. It's healthy and it's natural, and the only way to help these people who are transgender is to modify their body to relieve the suffering. All of the people inside the field of gender affirming medicine, I believe, are true believers in this completely absurd, completely false belief system. And then I think they've they've created a mountain of junk science to support what they are doing to these young people. And I think even if they have a little bit of doubt, which I've got to say, I think they must on some level, most of them have some sort of doubt at this point with the Detransition is showing up with everything, all of the science being exposed as being shoddy and appalling. They've got to start having doubts, but there's a there's a wonderful concept that Megan McArdle, she's a journalist for The Washington Post. She calls it the Oedipus trap. And she wrote this gorgeous piece she was actually writing about Walter Freeman, the inventor of the trans orbital prefrontal lobotomy, and Walter Freeman went to his grave believing that the prefrontal lobotomy was a gift to humanity, that even in spite of the fact, like he even in the last years of his life after lobotomy had fallen out of fashion, it was it was reviled. Basically. He spent the final years of his life while dying of cancer, driving around the United States, visiting the people that he had performed his lobotomies on, searching for proof that this was an ethical, beneficial medical treatment. So he was coming face to face with all of the victims. That's what he was doing. That was the point of what he was doing, and yet he couldn't see the harm that he had done. And so Megan McArdle frames it as the Oedipus trap, in that some mistakes are so terrible that you can't allow yourself to look upon them. He was coming face to face with it, but he couldn't let himself see it. And I think the doctors in the field of gender medicine, perhaps they got swept up in something. Perhaps they were duped at the beginning. You know, I don't I don't even know that the Dutch who started it all were they didn't set out to hurt anyone. They set out to help, and they didn't realize that they were not helping. And or every step along the way, they ignored any evidence that they might be doing harm. Because how can you admit to yourself that you've you've done something this terrible, that you've that you've harmed innocent, young people? So I do suspect that there's an awful lot of willful blindness going on. The harm is right there in front of them, but they can't let themselves see it. The evidence is right there that that there is no evidence. The proof is right there, that there is no evidence. But they can't allow them to see it. And then we've got there's another aspect to it that just makes this one so much worse. Is it's the us versus them. It's the anyone who opposes this medical treatment or questions it or challenges it, like SEGM or Genspect or anyone. They're hateful and they've got a whole activist movement drumming up the hate, saying anyone who questions it, they're just transphobic bigots. And so that reinforces this willful blindness. It gives them an easy there is going to be cognitive dissonance, right. But it's very easy for them to resolve that by just saying, oh, everyone attacking me as a trans phobe. It's not that I've done anything wrong, it's just that they're hateful bigots. And so because of trans activism, because the entire field is propped up by trans activism and trans activism gives them that perfect excuse not to look on the harm transphobes to even look there. So I don't I said, when did I? I don't know where I was saying this. I said this recently oh it was to Gordon Guyatt, we;ll get there in time. It is a field of medicine that simply cannot self-correct. It has gone. It's always been ideologically driven. It's always been populated by extreme fanatics. And they are. They are so far off the rails. They have done so much harm and they can't let themselves see it. But this is a field of medicine in North America that cannot self-correct. And that's why we need that's why I disagree so strongly with Gaia when he says the bands are unconscionable. We need somebody on the outside to step in and force these people to stop doing the harm that they're doing. Yeah. And Oren and I have spoken so many times what the concept of good intentions executed poorly. But I think this is that on steroids. And then when refuted they double down and everything that you just said. It just it's, been made so much worse. Do we want to transition, no pun intended, transition to the topic of Guyatt or do we want to save that for a little bit later? This might be the perfect time. The only thing I'll say is, I mean, just what you described, it's this term gets tossed around, you know, cognitive dissonance or cognitive dissonance reduction. And people who don't quite understand it, they use it. But this is truly, literally the one of the most obvious cases of such, because people don't want to think of themselves, they want to see themselves as good or, you know, or smart. And when he does something bad or not so smart, right. It causes such dissonance with regard to your self-concept that they truly cannot accept it. And yeah, I mean, if you're a doctor, if you're a parent, or if you're the person who's done it themselves, how do you come to terms with that? And that's why anytime I see someone who has seen the light, who has somehow overcome that, you know, that that distress, that it can produce this, this realization like, oh my gosh, what the hell have I done? Like, I have so much admiration for them. I don't admire what they did in the first place. But, you know, coming clean and coming forward. I think it's really important. And, you know, I think we're seeing a few more people doing that. So, you know, anyway, so, about someone who hasn't done that and, this is okay. But before we do, actually, if I can ask you one question to me, I just. If I forget. Sorry, Malini, it's a silly question, but I have to ask. Okay. So I've been following you since near the beginning, if not the beginning of your journey in this, you know, in this realm. So I'm just curious if you could say this was the, let's say, the marker, like the kind of the highlight or the. This is where I've had the most, reception, like where people have actually seen the work I'm doing or anything like that. What would you mark as or count as, like the, you know, the, the, the zenith of your work so far? In terms of how much exposure or how successful or how much of an impact on me, what to any. Metric, take your metric. That is like a phrase. I'm just I mean, I really like to I, I like to look I have this the, the Twitter thread that resulted in Michael Shellenberger offering me a job is the pivotal moment in my life. That Twitter thread. It's so strange, but that Twitter thread did change my life because that's how I ended up going off into another stratosphere. Working for Michael Shellenberger. I got the WPATH Files, and then I got all of the exposure that I would not have had had I not had this completely bizarre opportunity. I'm very grateful, obviously, to Michael for that. But, you know, I just wrote a Twitter thread. It was just a thought experiment about, it was imagine a world in which there's, an amputee rights movement. You know, there's a parallel, paraphilia with autogynephilia is men who are aroused at the fantasy of becoming women. And then there's a parallel one, men who are aroused at the fantasy of becoming amputees. And I just put a thought experiment changing trans rights for amputee rights. And then you get a social contagion of kids, and they all want their legs chopped off and everyone's celebrating it and stuff. Just to the point was to snap people out of their their support. They've been conditioned to support trans rights, and it was just to snap people out and make them realize what they're actually supporting. But files got enormous exposure, and it got that because we put a lot of effort into it. Michael is exceptionally good at this kind of thing, and we flew to London and pitched the story. We flew to New York and DC. We really put a lot of effort into making that a big story. But it's interesting you asked that question because honestly, on Monday was the day that we released the Gordon Guyatt interview, and that was, as big of an event as w pap files. For me, that was a day that was immensely overwhelming. You know what the one clip of Gordon Diet has been viewed millions of times. You know, this is a story that I think just by chance. And, Oh, it's his doing for being so rude and obnoxious. That's what made it super viral. We we really just shattered a pillar of expertise in, in this scandal that that there's so much about this scandal that is the appeal to authority. It is people trusting that because experts say this is ethical medical care it must be ethical medical care, because the medical association say that this is a safe, beneficial treatment, then it must be a safe, beneficial treatment. And that it is crucial to destroy that narrative. It's crucial to make people see that that's a fallacy, that there's no truth to that. Experts are human and they can lose their way just like the rest of us. And there's never been an example ever, in all of history. I do not believe of experts completely getting something wrong and endorsing something that is very harmful. And just that two minute Gordon Guyatt clip went all over the world and showed what we are up against. Okay. So, so maybe you've you've touched upon it and maybe elaborate a little bit, please. For people who don't know yet, can you understand what you're talking about? And I hope that they will go see it and the entire interview. It's a long story, so I'll try and do the CliffsNotes version. I will start. I'll start from the beginning, though. I will tell you that I invited Doctor Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University onto my podcast back in May. Guaytt, doctor Guyatt, is one of the most distinguished doctors in the world. He is the godfather. He's known as the godfather of evidence based medicine. He created evidence based medicine. Before that, it was more kind of expert opinion and consensus and medicine. He invented evidence based medicine to protect the medical world from fads and fashions and, you know, just experts running away with their ideas. So there's a deep irony to this story that will become clear as I tell it. And so I invited him on to my podcast in May just to talk about evidence based medicine. It probably would have been the most boring interview ever had events not unfolded in the meantime. And so he he said yes, and we set it up for September 8th. He was away for the whole summer, so we just set it up. And then in the intervening months, while it was August, what happened in August is no. Well, I have to go back a little bit. Earlier this year, McMaster, a team at the McMaster HEI is the is the initialism. I can't remember what it stands for. It's it's one of the centers of systematic reviews, one of the most respected centers to perform systematic evidence reviews in the world, obviously, because it's the birthplace of evidence based medicine. And the bedrock of evidence based medicine is a systematic review where you take all of the evidence for a particular treatment and you grade its quality, and then you can make your guidelines or your decisions based upon the strength of the evidence. So this team had looked at they had been commissioned by a group called the society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine System to look at the evidence for pediatric gender medicine. There will be no surprise when I say that they looked at the evidence and they found that there isn't any, there isn't any. It's all low quality garbage, junk science and so they publish these reviews. Local trans activists just freak out as they do. It's totally predictable. It's exactly what you would expect. They go on this unhinged social media campaign, which I'm very proud to say I'm now featured on their Instagram account, very proud to have a place on that wall. And they, they are harassing Guyatt and the other t the other members of the team. And then McMaster just do the most appalling capitulation. Basically, they give in to the demands of these insane, unhinged trans activists. They publish this statement basically saying the bans on puberty blockers are unconscionable. This is medically necessary. They're talking about denying medical care to nonbinary youth. Guyatt and his team refer to themselves as, you know, they're saying, oh, we didn't know SEGM were a bunch of haters or whatever. And not quite those words, but they're like, we're non-trans, Cisgender researchers. We didn't know that they were transphobic. It's this bizarre, bizarre statement I thought when I first read it, it was written by Egale Canada, because I've read enough Egale statements to recognize their tone and it looked like a statement written by Egale Canada. And there's a section in there where Guyatt and the gang say, we've donor will no longer take money from SEGM and we've donated, we've made personal donations to Egale. So I don't I don't know, I can't prove it was, but it certainly reads like it was. So all of this happens and I can't say a word. I'm dying to say something, right? But I can't say anything publicly because in three weeks time, I'm set to interview Gordon Guyatt, and I want to interview him because in good faith, I want to hear his side of the story. It wasn't some sort to like, you know, ensnare him and get him to make a fool of himself. I didn't even for a moment think that was going to happen. But anyway, so on the morning of September 8th, so Stella O'Malley and I, Stella is founder Genspect and my co-host. We talked beforehand and we were so nervous we didn't think you'd show up. First of all, we just thought he would had forgotten all about it and he would cancel. So we're really nervous. We're planning the whole interview and everything, and then he shows up and it was just the early parts, you know, we were leading though. We were just feeling our way around. He's talking about evidence and whatever. And then he just kind of goes on a bit of a rant about how unconscionable it is that Danielle Smith in Alberta has banned puberty blockers and, and, and he was very upset that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had taken his research and used it for nefarious reasons. I think he said, or egregious purposes or something like that. And you start to realize, yes, he's one of the most distinguished doctors in the world, but one, he has no understanding of the scandal of pediatric gender medicine. And two, he's quite clearly letting his politics guide his opinion here. He's he's a member of the NDP. We know that, right? He ran for NDP a couple of times. He's he's he's got a certain political slant, but he's letting that get in the way. And so I basically just asked him, why did you cite like so his reviews find that there's no evidence. So the only low quality evidence that means you can't call the interventions medically necessary, because for something to be medically necessary, it has to be it has to be treating a diagnosable condition. And it has to show that it is beneficial in treating that condition. No such evidence exists, and he knows it. So I asked him why he had signed a statement saying that it's medically necessary, and he just he got so angry, he said, that's ridiculous. I would never say that, you're wrong. If you can find those words in my statement, I'll have to go and jump off a bridge. And of course, I'd read the statement like 50 times. And every time I read it, my eyes landed on medically necessary. And I thought, how can he say it's medically necessary? So I pretend to be fact checking myself and I'm just putting up the statement. Then I read him the relevant part, and he was obviously completely humiliated because he just made a complete fool of himself. And he said, oh, I didn't read that part. He signed the statement that he didn't even read, and he put his name, which is a name that carries enormous weight. He's very distinguished. If if the godfather of evidence based medicine says that gender affirming care for young people is medically necessary, again, the appeal to authority people are going to believe that because his name carries weight and he carelessly, and it's an act of cowardice as well, he just capitulated to trans activists. He carelessly signed his name to something he didn't even read them for. But like honestly, truly, probably condemning a whole bunch of families to this nightmare. Because these families will think that this is ethical medical care, this is medically necessary. I have to do this for my daughter, for my son. And then there's another really what's what's so stupid about it is, of course, we all know, right? We learn at in the schoolyard. You don't show weakness to bullies. And these trans activists are just bullies, nothing more. There's no there's no reason to what they're asking. There's no they're just aggressive bullies. So McMaster capitulated, did everything they asked. And then the bullies are not happy. They're not they're not satisfied. So they've already launched an open letter demanding a retraction of those systematic reviews. Now they cost, goodness knows how much money they took many, many years to produce. And there's nothing wrong with them. The science is rock solid. The process was rock solid, but the activists are not satisfied. They want those reviews to be pulled now. I asked Guyatt if that was going to happen and he said no, absolutely no way. So he hasn't pleased the activist. He's destroyed his reputation and made a complete fool of himself and for nothing. He still has angry trans activists constantly attacking him and vilifying him because that's what they do. And he still hasn't retracted the medically necessary part of that statement. He's just left it there, and I think he's hoping it will blow over. Yeah. So, so a couple of things, I guess first one is, since that came out, I mean, has there been any fallout for you for exposing the truth? I don't noice negative if there's people freaking out about it, I'm sure there are. I mean, well, I don't pay any attention to anyone who would even criticize me for that because their opinion is less than worthless. So if they're out there complaining, they can go for it. I don't care the I like I said, I did make it onto the deranged, demented trans activist Instagram account that is constantly attacking McMaster. They they put us on there and that's great. They can put me on there as many times as they like. I'm perfectly happy with that. They are worthless individuals, and there's zero chance that I would back down because of those lunatics. But it speaks for itself. Again, it's one of those. It's like it's very much like the Boe v Marshall unsealed documents that trans activists didn't attack and didn't didn't fact check or anything in that Guyatt saying that speaks for itself. There's not any way that trans activists can frame that, that I somehow did that out of transphobic hate. There's nothing they can do with it. It's one of those moments that just is untouchable. And I think it's one of the most pivotal moments in the gender war in just how completely unbelievable it was. Like, this is, this just shows who the experts are, and it shows how completely untrustworthy the they are. So just to build on the Guyatt, let's say fiasco, there was another, narrative that was shattered not that long ago. If you just want to maybe tell everybody a little bit about that. This is so transitional suicide. This is the the only medical justification they ever had for doing this to healthy young people is they claim, trans activists, gender affirming care providers will claim that if you do not offer these interventions, the young person is at a high risk of suicide and they overblow these suicide statistics. They pull numbers out of thin air. There's garbage, junk science. They've got no science whatsoever. And we've been trying to combat this misinformation because it's the most dangerous lie out there. They'll take it. They'll say to parents, right. You know, would you rather a live son or a dead daughter emotionally blackmailing parents into consenting? And then. Yeah, it just this year was it? I don't know when it was, but in the Skrmetti case at the Supreme Court of the United States, an enormous moment happened where the ACLU, again, they are just always there. They want these kids to be transitioned. The ACLU star lawyer, Chase Strangio, this is a woman who thinks she's a man. She's on testosterone, and she's a hardcore trans activist. And she was it was in the sort of witness I was in the the I can't remember what the word is. It'll come to me. So they're all testifying. It's a it's a the both sides have to testify and make their case. And Chase Strangio was being cross-examined by the judges. And one asked is there any evidence that gender affirming interventions, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, is there any evidence that these are lifesaving? And the interesting thing is, in the Supreme Court of the United States, you can't just scream, you know, transphobia, hate cuz you're you're the your opponent of bigotry and shut down debate. You actually have to tell the truth. And you can't just make statements based on no evidence. And so Chase Strangio had to say no, there's no evidence that these interventions are lifesaving because there's no evidence that there's a suicide epidemic. There's actually she had to admit that there's increased suicidality, which is suicidal thoughts, but there's actually no sign that these kids are committing suicide. And therefore, as a result, there is no sign that these medical interventions prevent the suicides. This happened in the United States Supreme Court. So we destroyed the pillar of this is medically necessary. We destroyed that with Gordon Guyatt, And we've also destroyed the transitional suicide narrative. So at this point, they've got basically nothing left. Right? Okay. And then along those lines, if someone because you know, Malia, we always asking and I know this should be the final question about, you know, at the end, but I'm just asking now because we may have a lot of discussion around it. You know, we always talk about how do you break through people's, you know, let's say, brainwashing or their, you know, self-serving, cognitive dissonance reduction and so on. So if you had to give 2 or 3 kind of like tentpole, whether we call them hoaxes, lies, you know, misinformation, disinformation that someone if they heard it, they go, oh my gosh, this changes everything. Now I get it. But that would really have an impact. Rather than letting them just kind of brushed aside and say, oh, she's just hateful. Like, what would you say? What would you advise to people? Good question. I always like the for the social contagion because, what what we have in our favor, is we have the truth on our side, and it doesn't actually take that much to show people the truth. And so for the social contagion, I have still. But I always used to when I was talking to people about this, I would show the graphs. So there are graphs for every pediatric gender clinic in the Western world for the period 20, probably 2012 to 2022 or 2024. So if you can just show one of those, but if you have a whole if you have a whole lot of them, that's great. But just one of them, it shows without a shadow of a doubt that this is an epidemic, that this is a social contagion. It's all you really need to show to show them the spike. And then a quick explanation of, you know, because every graph, if you've got more than one graph, they all spike a 2014, 2015. And then if you quickly explain that that is precisely when the modern trans rights movement began and the messaging and where bombarding kids with the messaging that if you hate your body, it could be a sign, your trends and then, oh, what a surprise, a whole bunch of kids show up at gender clinics hating their bodies and thinking that they are trans. It's not even complicated. But then to go along with that, if you really have somebody who does not want to believe you, you will get the it's societal acceptance. How do you know? You know, the left handed graph drives me crazy, but how do you know that it's not just these were all trans and that the modern trans rights movement, the societal acceptance, and they finally feel comfortable coming out, as you know, transgender. And there's a very simple rebuttal to that. And it's that it affects only adolescent girls, which is the very demographic that we've always known is most affected by social contagion. So if it were societal acceptance and we've got this surge in adolescent girls, you would have to see a similar surge in women in their 30s, women in their 40s, in their 50s, in their 60s, lining up to get shots of testosterone, by that bilateral mastectomies, because society will now accept them as the men that they always were. And they do not exist because it's a social contagion. And social contagion does not strike that demographic. It strikes adolescent girls. And then there's those. There's even more to it, I suppose, in that. You can point to parallel. Well, this is me going on probably too long. And please. Please, not at all. No. Know, I always love the example of TikTok Tics. So if you can point to that parallel epidemic, which I find most people, if you're doing this in the right way, this is a fascinating subject to talk about. And if the person you're talking to is not a complete fanatic and is actually listening to you, they'll probably find this really interesting. But in I think the paper was published in 2022, it's a German paper. But they started, I think, in 2019, German psychiatrist start to see a bunch of adolescent girls showing up with Tourette likes and symptoms, and they're like, they know it's not Tourette's because you can actually test for Tourette's, right? There's little mini seizures and you can test. And they knew they could tell by looking that it wasn't Tourette's, but they also could test and prove that it wasn't actual twins. And the other two little, clue was all the kids were saying the same things. They were doing the same output. They were doing the same. It's the same tics. And they traced it to it wasn't even. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes for this. They trace it to this German YouTuber with Tourette's who had exploded into popularity. over a million followers in no time at all. And all that these girls were watching his TikTok videos and then they were producing the symptoms of Tourette's. Unconsciously. Not not. They weren't like play acting. It wasn't, you know, the they would they were just absorbing it. It's just social contagion. We are social creatures. And so they immediately when they see this brand new patient population of adolescent girls and they have a different type of Tourette like symptoms, they immediately look to find the source. And they found it on social media. And I tell anyone, if we if gender medicine were a field of medicine, like any other, they would have seen the surge in adolescent girls. Starting in 2015, a brand new patient cohort out of nowhere explodes seeking a medical transition. And they would have said, what is causing this? And then they would have looked into the culture exactly like they did with tiktok tics. They would have found exactly like they did with tiktok tics. They'd have found the trans influencers popping up on YouTube, multiplying everywhere online. They have found that these girls were just mimicking what they were seeing on the internet and imbibing the cultural narrative and embodying the symptoms. But because trans activism is not guided by reason or science or truth, it's ideologically based. They did not do that. And it's it always reaches people. I've never I personally, I've never failed except for I have to say now, I hate that I have to say this, but I did an event with Peter Bogossian in Florida in February and my it was not so. Not a debate. He doesn't do debates. He does street epistemology. So it's a discussion. You're just talking have a different opinion and you're talking and my the person who was there who disagreed with me flat out refused to listen to anything I said. Maybe it's because the cameras were rolling and maybe it was because it was being released. But this man, I have to admit now that I have one failure and it's him. And what aspects of what you were saying was he refusing to accept. And literally everything? Yeah, yeah, I saw that video. So you can watch it. Okay. And there's even more to that story. Listen to this. So we we filmed in a cool location in Florida in this dark bar, and it was all very cool. We filmed for hours and hours and there's are three videos that were released. But while we're in this bar and I'm with this guy for like seven hours and we're not, we don't hate each other. It's it's good faith. But he's not listening to anything I say. He doesn't believe me, thinks I'm a terrible person. And so he has a podcast. And so during this event, I say he asked me onto his podcast, I agreed, I went on his podcast, we ended up filming two, two, two hour podcasts and at the end of it when he released, he released it with a little introduction, calling me the Anita Bryant of the anti-trans movement. But Anita Bryant's like some rampant religious homophobe of the 1970s. Yeah, so didn't listen to a word. There are some people who are unreachable. He has a non-binary child. I do wonder if the child is medicalized, if it's one of those where you can't let yourself listen. I think I didn't I didn't make it, didn't reach him. Right. I want to go back to something briefly that you said before, that I just can't get out of my mind. And we've spoken about this topic so many times on this podcast. And for some reason, this thing that you said just is sticking with me, that this is the and I'm paraphrasing what you said, but this is the the one medical condition that is being treated without the evidence to support it. It's not a diagnosis that is being treated with the evidence that is known to treat that diagnosis. I, I can't get past that. It's worse than that though, in that it's it's an entire field of medicine that progresses without a diagnosis. Yeah. So not only is there absolutely no evidence and, you know, I don't want anyone to be confused here. I'm not just talking about pediatric gender medicine. I'm talking about all of gender medicine. If you look at if you look at any of the science for any of it, for adults, you know, men on estrogen, women on testosterone, vaginoplasty, phalloplasty look at any of it for adults, children, adolescents, adults, whatever. You will find that there's no evidence. And this is a field of medicine that's been going since the 1960s, but they've never bothered to do any research to to find out whether it's beneficial or effective. So not only is there no evidence, there's also no diagnosis. You are treating a self-declared identity. There's no illness. They might pretend that they're treating gender dysphoria or gender incongruence, but those are trans activist created diagnoses that are completely empty of any meaning. And so they overlap with all sorts of other disorders, you know, depression, anxiety, trauma, whatever. So there's no distinct discrete diagnosis that you're treating. And then you have no evidence to support the drastic, irreversible medical interventions that you are that you are prescribing. So it exists outside of medicine. That's why it's it's quite simply not medicine. And that's the easiest way to think about it, that you can. I always like to tell people little tidbits of information that I've come across that just astound me. And one of them is in 2020. Unlike the Cochrane Library, it's another center hub for systematic reviews. I'm not sure who commissioned it, but the Cochrane Library tried to do a systematic review of the evidence for estrogen therapy for men who identify as women. And they they they gather all the reviews, they gather all the research. And then the conclusion of their review is just astounding. They say in four decades of this experiment going on, not one single study meets the lowest bar for inclusion in our review. So we have no studies included in the review. There's nothing no one has ever bothered to do. It in four decades of this experiment. So if I'm going on too long, though, I just like this is hilarious to me. The New York Times did that podcast, The Protocol, which enraged me, but I won't go into why, because that's a long story. But they do this podcast episode. It's six episodes. They totally missed the point. It's just ridiculous. But in episode five, Marci Bowers, who was the president of WPATH, they interview Marci Bowers and he's becoming unraveled. You can tell the stress is getting to this man. He thinks he's a woman. So he is interviewed in there and he's basically saying the reason that there is no research in the field of gender medicine is because Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins, in 1979, Paul McHugh shut down John Money's gender clinic because they found that they weren't helping these men. What so at all, Marci Bowers thinks that that's the reason that there's no research in gender medicine, because Paul McHugh shut it down in 1979 as if they haven't had decades to perform the damn research. But, notes Paul McHugh's fault. Wow. They just they seem to like they just seem to think. Grasping at straws. Well, someone out there should be doing the research. And any day now, the justification for chopping off penises and attaching arm flesh appendages to women's groins any day now, the justification is going to arrive, but they're not doing any of the research themselves. I just I'll just throw this out there, as we've you've alluded to it and we've talked about it before many times. The one thing I think that, you know, when we're talking about what like, kind of like the tentpole hoaxes or something, the fact that, I mean, I think more people today have heard of autogynephilia, the last couple of years come out, but I don't know how many people I've, I've talked about this so many times or in wherever I speak, whether it's talking to the person at a party or publicly, you know, just saying. Have you ever wondered, you know, like like have you ever, ever, you know, thought that there are different pathways to someone identifying as trans and the fact that there are these different pathways, but they're never talked about like, you know, like it's just all under one umbrella, which down to non-binary. Also, I think it's just, you know, in any other field or annoyance or in any other phenomenon. Okay, such a vagueness, such a lack of scientific rigor would just shock people, especially when, as you've been saying so often that the, the consequences are so drastic, you know, and so that's one I think that's one thing that also kind of shocks people, because they had no idea they were just being kind people, thinking, here's this person who ABCd and we're just going to, you know, help them lead a better life. So I think that's one of the, you know, revelations that can kind of wake people up a little bit, honestly. Denial. Right. Which they do sometimes. True. I mean, I had really one of the, one of the thing that kickstarted my career was that I, I was bragging on Twitter to my like 100 followers or something like that. I was bragging on Twitter that I had never failed to peak people. To peak is when you get somebody who doesn't know anything about it, who accept all the trans nonsense they hit the peak of what they can accept, and then they just come tumbling down to reality. So I was bragging that I'd never failed to peak all these woke Canadians, and they asked the Terfs asked me for my technique, and I. I wrote a Twitter thread of how I did it, and I had my strategy. And it's a it was a bold one because I used to start with autohgynephilia. I do think that is the key, but it's very difficult to talk about fetishes in polite society. It's very difficult to go there. And so you have to I was doing it one on one with my friends, and I would start with auto kind of philia, and I would tell them, you know, this is going to be difficult for you to accept, but but believe me when I say it's true. And then I would explain that, you know, most of the men who identify as women are aroused. They have a paraphilia. They're aroused by the fantasy of becoming women, of having female bodily functions. And I had a folder on my phone, photographs that I had taken from Twitter. I probably still have it, actually. I'm not sure, of Autogynephilic men because the trans rights movement, they did do a remarkable job. They're very good at marketing, aren't they? So they've got Laverne Cox on the cover of time magazine, very heavily Photoshop looking, very feminine. Well, not really, but not looking how most trans identified men look, that's for sure. Caitlyn Jenner, same thing. Heavy Photoshop and in for me growing up in England on a very steady diet of Coronation Street, we had, a character, Hayley Cropper, who was planted it turns out, planted into Coronation Street by a trans activist group in the 1990s because they wanted to use Coronation Street as a way to, prepare people for the Gender Recognition Act. That was ready. That was that was coming in, passed in 2004. That's that's not I mean, we know that's their tactic, right? They they actually did get trans identified characters, very positive portrayals of trans identified characters into all sorts of television shows and into the media. But the interesting thing about Hayley Cropper is she was played by a woman. So it's like, you've got this. For most people of my generation, Brits, when people say trans women are women, I'm thinking, oh, Hayley Cropper, she's just, you know, poor, vulnerable Hayley. She just wants to be accepted by the women at the sewing factory. And then there's, like, an evil woman who won't accept Hayley and calls her a man and everything. So they really primed us for it. But I used to. So I had my folder, my AGP folder, so that if anyone's picturing Hayley Cropper or something like Hayley Cropper, I show them the reality. This is actually what we're talking about. And it's very clear that these men are getting off on it. It's a sexual thing. In fact, I interviewed Ray Blanchard. It hasn't been released yet, but it's one of the best interviews we've done. And I put it to him. He had tweeted once he'd seen, like, this video compilation of just autogynephilic men, the things they put on the internet, somebody had compiled it and he tweeted it saying, I just can't believe what these men are putting online I just can't believe it. And I asked him, is there some sort of I is a part of auto kind of philia that they can't see what we see. And he said, absolutely. They see a really sexy woman. We see a ridiculous man with a wig and a dress clunking around, you know? And so there is a kind of there's an element of self-deception, a very strong, strong element of self-deception. But if you can show people most people don't move in our Twitter world, right? Most people don't see that. So they're they're picturing something much less sexual, much less, erotic. So before we close off for today, I'm curious, Mia, what do you hope what impact do you hope your work has like 30 years from now? When you look back like is there something that you're hoping to achieve or accomplish, or are you just taking it as it comes? I part of how I got this whole career is because I was studying past medical scandals, comparing them to now, and that just really resonated with people. I think you're drawing from the past and seeing the parallels and seeing how this type of thing happens over and over really helps people in the here and now who are experiencing it, understand what's happening. So I kind of know I, I've read so many, I've read so about so many medical scandals that I can kind of almost see a history books. I can almost see there are things that I just know I that Guyatt moment is going down in history. It's just one of those things that is going to be written about in the history books. It's going to be studied. I'm not sure. I would hope that I'm not really doing it for legacy. I'm not really doing it for what people of the future will think of me. My entire approach has always been to to help people understand where we are, why this is happening, and always with the the young victims who are sucked into it at the very forefront of my mind, it really helps to know one. And so because I've got one girl, 16 years old, had her breast cut off at CHEO, I have her front and center in my mind at all times. And so everything I write and everything I say, it's thinking about how it will impact her because she's innocent. So I don't go in for the rage baiting, I don't go in for just generating outrage and sensational stuff. Although I do. I do my own slips always when I write about phalloplasty. If you see me on Twitter and I've been reading phalloplasty literature, my language will be so much harsher because I can't help it. It causes something inside me to snap and I just I unleash. But I would hope that I'm sure I'm in the history books. I'm sure I'm. One thing I do think is in the history books, and I'm a part of it, is Genspect and the Genspect conferences. So Stella O'Malley, the founder, had, I think this is her best idea. She decided that Jen Specht was going to follow path around the world everywhere. W path has a conference. Jen Specht sets up a conference in the same city at the same time, and it's an opposing view. And and it started in 2021 where Genspect was tiny and WPATH was huge. And had the advantage. But now we're going to be in Albuquerque in two weeks. WPATH will be in Albuquerque and so will Genspect. And it's amazing how much has changed. We have the upper hand. I almost look at WPATH they've done. They're just they still exist but their reputation is in tatters. And now Genspect has taken the lead and we're leading the way out. And we're going to show how we can get out of this mess. But I know that the Genspect/WPATH parallel conferences are going to be studied by historians, because they'll provide medical historians with a great snapshot of where each side was in 2024 and 2025. What were they talking about at the WPATH conference? What were they talking at about the Genspect conference? And there is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind who emerges on the right side of this one. So in that respect, I'm sure I'm in the history books. Amazing. All right. So can I build on your question, Malini to ask the question that you usually ask? Okay. Yeah. But it's very specific. So so we always ask what people can do, you know, with regard to the topic, you know, for themselves or to, to do to better society. So I'm going to ask you a very specific question, which is because you touched upon it for somebody who, let's say, gets into the the gender wars, okay, usually they do. For most people it's either because it's something personal to them, whether a family member went through it or they had, you know, some kind of gender related distress or, you know, concern, confusion themselves, etc.. So it's often a very personal endeavor. Okay. Or it's, you know, it's, a medical or scientific or. Right, whatever. However they bring themselves to this. Okay. I have seen many people, you know, since I kind of became very vocal quite a few years ago, I've seen many people get into either, whether it's gender wars or any other type of movement for the wrong reasons. It doesn't become about it's not about the cause anymore or helping somebody. It's about themselves, okay, the right and the glory or whatever they want. Right? So what would you say? How would you help? What would you say to people who do get involved in this to say, you know, have the right perspective, don't make it about yourself. Stay true to the cause, but not an ideologue with it, you know? But just basically keep your highs based in your mind, focused in reality. What's your best advice to help people keep the right perspective? I think I might have already answered this. So if it's not the answer you want, though, tell me. I genuinely think it is. Have a real person in your mind, right? Because we're all we should. You're right. There are definitely people who are in this for the glory and and for their own gain. But you shouldn't don't you should get into this because you want to end this medical scandal. You want to protect the young people on the right to, a childhood and adolescence grounded in truth and the right to make it into adulthood healthy and whole and it can be so ugly and it can be so. There's so much outrage and there's so much horror and there's so much despair. So I really do think have a real human being in your mind and as well in the trans issue, I've seen it. I've seen it happen so many times where people will get upset if I show compassion towards people who identify as transgender and you've lost your humanity. If you can't feel compassion for these people because they were completely innocent, they came of age in a time where society had completely, completely lost touch with reality and they were thrown into something they got sucked into something that they could not ever possibly have understood. And then a medical world was lying in wait to imprint that folly on their body. If you you have to have compassion, even if you think it was stupid of them, even if you think they should have known better. You have to have compassion and realize what kind of mad time in history we are living through. And I really think I know too many to be honest. I know too many of the victims personally, and I know their families and and so I have many to choose from. But just keep a real person in your mind. Remember that there were real lives affected by this, and put those front and center in everything you do. I mean, unfortunately, the trans rights activists will say that's exactly what we're doing, right? Unfortunately, because they think that they are saving these people's lives, they think they're doing what's best for them, as you know. And yeah, I mean, that's just it's an unfortunate reality of of the gender wars, you know, because people truly believe that they are on the right side of history. So let's just hope, looking back, you know, that will be clearly delineated. You know, who caused more. You know who did, who had the right motives and the right intentions and outcomes versus not. So. Yes. Yeah. Mia, thank you so much for being with us today. This was such an engaging conversation, so interesting. And like I said, you brought to light something I hadn't considered before as well. So I'm hope the same is true for our listeners as as they listen to this episode. Yes. Thank you so much. I mean, I'm so grateful to have you. Come on. Especially after the whole Guyatt fiasco. Well, for him and, again, I think it's so revealing. And maybe that will be one of those, you know, those those cultural moments that people say, Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. So on that hopeful note, until next time, keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel.