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We do not know if, when, or how the lemming-like rush to propagate the experimental and non-evidence based practice of pediatric sex trait modification will be brought to heel. But if the United States eventually follows the lead of the Social Democratic nations of northern Europe toward reason and reality — acknowledging that the practice never had a strong evidence base to support it before it was drastically scaled up in response to activist pressure across American institutions — it will be in no small part thanks to the efforts of the woman pictured above.
Mason has for five years been virtually alone in doing what we would expect every conscientious medical practitioner to do in the face of a bizarre social contagion — of girls with no prior history of nonconformity suddenly declaring themselves to be “really” “boys” after prolonged exposure to transgender influencers and online communities — that sought her out unbidden in the waiting room of her pediatric office in a suburb of Portland, Oregon. She began asking questions. She exercised her critical faculties. She followed the trail of evidence to where it led — unearthing along the way a medical scandal of shocking proportions. And she seamlessly transformed herself from a workaday pediatrician to an activist within the gates of the institution that bears more direct responsibility than any other single entity for the lemming-like rush to propagate pediatric sex trait modification within American medicine, the American Academy of Pediatrics.
I caught up with Mason three weeks ago in the aftermath of a sudden development that may (or may not) demonstrate that this important American institution can pull itself off the precipice upon which it has placed itself: the AAP in early August announced both that it was reaffirming a position it had taken in 2018, in support of pediatric gender medicine, while also undertaking a “comprehensive evidence review” of the science of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender affirming surgeries in minors. The decision marks a victory for Mason who for several years running had been subject to irregular parliamentary maneuvers intended to keep resolutions she had authored calling on the AAP to undertake a comprehensive review of the evidence concerning the science of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender affirming surgeries in minors. We spoke about the prospects of the AAP undertaking this process with integrity and whether and how the ongoing institutional cascade around this practice will be brought to heel.
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Today's bonus podcast for paid subscribers is the first 40 minutes of my marathon conversation with Corinna Cohn. Toward the end of that podcast, I referred to the beginning of our conversation as "tense." I don't mean that we were in any way hostile, just that it took a little while for us to fully establish our rapport and for the conversation to bec…
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This is the audio version of a video interview published earlier.
Here is the second in a series of three interviews with Anna Slatz, the founder of Reduxx Magazine. The first hour of this marathon interview told the story of that online publication’s founding for paid subscribers only. The second hour and a half, posted above and available to all, contains the bulk of an interview in which we go over the ten craziest stories covered by Reduxx. This section was interrupted by technical difficulties toward the end. A few days later we recorded another hour and a half in which we wrapped up the last of the ten stories and went on to discuss various other issues that will be featured in the third and final episode of this series next week.
A perusal of the Reduxx website on any given day explains the difficulty Slatz had in picking the stories to include in this interview. Reduxx routinely has the most disturbing story you’ve ever heard in your life posted to their website, all generated by the absurdity of defining “woman” as “anyone who says they are a woman,” which the ruling institutions of the Western world have already done or are in the process of doing.
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Reduxx is not a site that targets a marginalized minority by associating it with rapists, pedophiles, and murderer. Its subject is not transgender crime per se but rather the bizarre deference that is shown to some of the world’s most depraved perpetrators by criminal justice systems and media outlets throughout the Western world honoring the self-declared gender identities of male rapists and murderers. This prioritization of the feelings of male rapists and murders over the safety of women and children is a continual reductio ad absurdum of the gender identity dogma which our media has made the considered decision to ignore, suppress, or collude with actively, thereby creating the vacuum in public awareness of the macabre Twilight Zone-like unreality into which transgender dogmas too often devolve in practice that Reduxx has emerged to fill.
Links to stories referenced:
EXCLUSIVE: Trans-Identified Male Coach Used Girls’ Locker Room to Undress Multiple Times, Incidents Kept Quiet by Pennsylvania School District
BREAKING: Trans Activist Sent To Women’s Prison To Serve Life Sentence For Slaughter Of California Family
CANADA: Man Who Raped Infant Quietly Moved to Prison with Mother-Baby Unit After Transgender Claim
EXCLUSIVE: Man Who Beat Two Babies To Death Allegedly Awaiting Breast Implants At California Women’s Prison
Top Academic Behind Fetish Site Hosting Child Sexual Abuse Fantasy, Push To Revise WPATH Guidelines
Violent Child Rapist, Murderer Now a Featured ‘Feminist, LGBTQ Advocate’
EXCLUSIVE: Australian Woman Left Disabled Following Attack By Trans Activist
Violent Transgender Killer Completes Sentence for Torture, Murder of 13-Year-Old Child
Sorority Members Made to Change Definition of ‘Woman’ to Admit 6’2 Trans-Identified Male
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Corinna Cohn is a software developer living in Indiana who was among the very first teenagers to go on cross-sex hormones in adolescence, at the age of 15 in 1993. He was inducted into a cross-sex identity on the very first transsexual-interest Internet Relay Chat groups in the early 1990’s and underwent vaginoplasty at the age of 19. After decades of attempting to live as a woman, he reached an acknowledgment that he insists every other person who undertakes the same quixotic endeavor will eventually acknowledge to be true: “Their sex is what they were born as. Everybody knows if you're born male, you're always male. If you're born female, you're always female. There's no disputing that.”
Having made irrevocable choices with his body while too young to understand the lifelong consequences that would flow from it, Cohn continues to take estrogen to this day (tied as he is to the medical leash that all those who undergo transgender medical procedures invariably bind themselves), and prefers to be properly sexed, but will humor those who insist on using the cross-sex pronouns that correspond to the gender presentation that attends a lifetime of estrogen intake. He is an eloquent writer and speaker who has extracted all the wisdom there is to derive from the misadventure on the far end of human extremity on which he launched himself while still a callow, impetuous young man. He has watched with dismay as this misadventure has been normalized and marketed to children by the very authorities that should be protecting them from practices that will do them harm.
He has devoted himself to ensuring that no child repeats the mistake he made — one that no child, in his considered judgment, can possibly be competent to make, particularly in the context of a pediatric clinical system that has abandoned all gatekeeping on principle. He has devoted himself to holding at bay the totalitarian overwriting of reality that would have to be executed to make the world safe for such damaged children — a project to which the ruling powers of the Western world have explicitly pledged themselves. We spoke for two and a half hours in July.
—Wesley Yang
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Excerpts:
On the state of pediatric gender medicine under the affirmative care model
“If you'd asked me four years ago, should children be allowed to transition? I would have said, “well, I think that there are some young people, not children, obviously, but young people — maybe 16, maybe even 14, who are so clear that they are so unhappy in their sexed body and have so much dysphoria and have so much dissonance with their bodies, that this might be the best thing for them. I would have said that a few years ago.
I still believe that we might find that there are some diagnostic criteria that give us some confidence that somebody who's a 16 year old might have a better life experience starting this.
But I don't believe that there's a single practicing gender clinician, or gender therapist or gender affirming social worker — I don't believe that there's a single person who's practicing right now…Let me let me put it that way. There might be people here and there. There is nobody who's part of a functioning system anywhere in the United States, where a young person can be exposed to this in a way that centers the needs of that young person. There's not a functioning system anywhere.”
The Moral Obligation that the Affirmative Care Model Shirks
Wesley: Can we muster the authority to say, “No, this isn't good for you. And we're allowed to say that, and that's actually our duty.”
Corinna: It is our duty. That is our duty! We owe others. We have social responsibilities. We owe others. And for these young people, we owe them protection and we owe them the truth. They deserve it.”
What’s Really at Stake
It's so frustrating. It is so frustrating, because anybody who's an adult, ought to be able to understand how much agency a child's house. And they ought to be able to understand how much pressure — we used to understand this thing called “peer pressure.” We used to understand social pressure. We're just completely discounting that and going, “oh, they're autonomous, they have autonomy, they've got embodiment goals, they're tiny, little adults making these decisions, who are we to tell them what their identity should be?'“
Like, you sons of bitches let these kids get medicine, get have hormones, have surgery that fucks up their bodies in ways that is going to make it…Here's the bottom line. For a lot of these young people, it is going to be very difficult for them to find loving, long term partners, because you have fucked up their bodies in ways that are going to complicate relationships. A lot of them are going to be able to do it. A lot of them are not. Chances are, they’re going to be a lot worse than they would have been if you hadn't fucked with their bodies.
And there's no way that you can take all of the success stories — because there will be out of the out of 10,000 or 100,000 kids that you're doing this to, of course, there's going to be some success stories. But you're gonna grab them and say, nevermind that behind the curtain these kids who've killed themselves, whose lives are devastated, who are lonely, who are by themselves, who feel like they're outcasts. Nevermind all of them. Look at look at these brilliant people.”
On Giving Up on an Impossible Dream
Corinna: “There used to be a festival called the women, Michigan Women's Music Festival. And I'd been invited to go to that. And I did some research and saw that it was women only. And I was okay with that. I was like, “All right, I don't want to create a stir. This is their rules. I want to abide by their rules.”
But you know, now I need a pretext not to go. But when I was researching that, I learned that there were some feminists who really, really hated trans people. I think there are some who do.
I wanted to learn a little bit more about that point of view, because I was like, “there are so many things that we have in common as people who are marginalized by men. Like, why are we enemies?”
So I started researching that, and I had more conversations with feminists. And one of them challenged me and said, basically, she said, “Why do you believe that you are an exceptional member of class woman instead of an exceptional member of class, man?”
And I was like, “I don't have an answer. Like, how dare you? Let me think about that, though. And I did. I thought about that a lot. And I was like, I am a male.”
Wesley: “So a TERF made a rational argument and persuaded you…”
Corinna: “That's your language. I will never call her a turf. I have a ton of admiration for her.”
Wesley: Okay. A feminist who does not recognize the claims of transgenderism made a rational argument, stumped you, and persuaded you that “yeah, I’m a man.” Rational argument is not usually the way these things are settled.
Corinna: She invited me to make my irrational argument. And I was like, “I can't. This is fundamentally irrational. And I found myself in this cul-de-sac. And I was like, I have to turn around and leave here.”
On the Coming Surge of Detransition
Here's what the trans people don't realize, and they ought to. The signs of this are so clear that it's shocking to me that they don't understand. I've understood this for a long time. I had no idea who Chloe Cole was. But I knew that a Chloe Cole was coming. The young woman who filed this newest lawsuit, I don't remember her name, but I didn't know who she was. But I knew that she was coming. In every single state where there's a gender clinic, there's going to be another Chloe Cole. Every single state that there's a gender clinic, there's going to be another Chloe Cole. It's going to be a riot. And when you've got 50, or 150, or 350, or 500 litigants…trying all of these different theories to try to make these poor kids whole again…one of them is going to crack. And then it's going to be over. It is going to be completely over. That's inevitable. But just because it's inevitable doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to run ahead of that, and still prevent more victims in the future.
On the Inherently Totalitarian Character of the Demands Issuing from the Transgender Movement
When I participate in this, when I fight against it, do you see why say it's not a choice for me? I cannot imagine a world where I do not try to prevent what you're talking about from happening to all of us. It's not only about protecting the kids. Sure, that's a very important part of it. This sort of totalitarian, absolute disparagement of our rights and our liberties, that must happen — these infringements must happen for the genderists to win. They're never going to succeed, it's never going to happen, we can see this with all the boycotts that are starting to appear. But for them to get to the future that they want, this is on their critical path. These infringements must happen for them to get them to their success state. And we cannot allow that to happen.
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On Affirming Parents
Corinna:
“For every parent who is transitioning their child, here's the future: your kid is going to get into their 20s and 30s. somewhere in this range. Even the ones who are failing to launch are going to figure out how to actually get their shit together at some point. Every one of these kids is going to start to ruminate. “How did this happen to me?” None of them are going to say, “Why did I do this to myself?” Because they didn't have agency. They didn't know. It doesn't matter if they said, “Oh, I really, really, really want to be a girl, mommy.” They don't know. They've got no idea. They're not even going to remember that. Right? They're not going to know that.”
“They're going to start thinking — “How did this happen to me?” And they're going to get to know kids. They're going to get to know children. Newborn babies. They're going to be involved with the lives of these children. They're going to watch them grow up and become thinking human beings. They're going to even watch them become adults. And they're going to know what innocence looks like. And they're going to start to remember that their innocence was absolutely destroyed.
And they're going to want to know why. And they will know at the time — I'm telling, I'm telling you now that the reason that this happens is largely because of the sexual interests of men like Rachel Levine, Admiral Levine, and other men who have continual fantasies that they wanted to be little girls”
So you have you have sent these children to satisfy the fantasies of these men. These children when they become adults are going to realize that this is why their innocence was destroyed: to make these fantasies come true. And the first people who will get the blame for this will be their parents. That is the future. That is the future.
Wesley: So I don't remember his name, bu he's like, “I'm 28 Look at me. I'm puberty blocked…”
Corinna. That was Seth.
Wesley: That was so powerful. And you're saying like, that's gonna happen to all these fucking parents?"
Corinna: Yes. It will not matter to these adult children…
Wesley: …that they begged and demanded and connived in order to get this is…
Corinna: I’m not even talking about that part. It won’t matter to these kids that their parents’ calculus was they want zero of one child to commit suicide. They don't care about one in 20,000. They want zero of one to commit suicide.
They won't care about their parents’ concerns. A lot of them aren't going to be able to have their own kids and so they're never going to even learn how to think like a parent. They're always going to think like a child. They're not going to appreciate what their parents were up against — being lied to by the government. Being lied to by their president being lied to by their doctors.
They're going to think “my parents ruined me.” For what? Why did my parents did my parents do this to me
So parents: that's what you have to look forward to.”
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Leor Sapir is a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who has become a leading figure in the ongoing effort to bring accountability to a medical field that has run off the rails.
In this episode of the Year Zero podcast, which was recorded in July, we discuss the fast evolving state of the legislative bans on child sex trait modification procedures and the wider project to bring an ongoing medical scandal to heel.
Excerpts:
Parallels between the opioid epidemic and pediatric gender medicine
“There are really interesting parallels between the opioid epidemic and the gender medicine issue. In both cases, for example, it started with medical authority, citing very, very low quality studies, claiming that the use of opioids in cancer patients could be scaled at large, and that the same type of risk benefit ratio would would apply to other types of patients — patients who are not, for example, terminally ill, or even patients with a history of addictions and patterns of addictive behavior. And that, of course, turned out not to be the case. The medical associations got involved and also fueled the opioid epidemic, sometimes for good intentions, sometimes, as in the case of the American Pain Society, because they were influenced by Big pharma money. So there, I think in the case of the opioid epidemic, there was just a clear villain, and the villain was Purdue Pharma. And it was a villain that the American Left loves to hate. Big corporate interests that make money off of health care. Here, I wouldn't want to argue that there aren't kind of pharma interests involved in general medicine, of course, there are, it's a big business, and it's growing too. And we have some evidence that clinics and hospitals that do the procedures as opposed to the psychotherapy get a net benefit from them. And they also, of course, boost their scores on the Corporate Equality Index, and, you know, ESG, and all that stuff. So there's definitely a lot of institutional self interest in doing so called gender affirming care. But I wouldn't argue that the financial motives are primary here. I think that they they definitely play a role. But I would say that the ideology is by far and away the most important factor. But in any case, there are strong parallels to the opioid epidemic. And, you know, this is another example of how we don't learn our lessons.
On the capture of American policymaking by the NGO Borg
“The ACLU never has to face voters. It's accountable only to its own funders. And those funders are increasingly a small number of deep pocketed foundations, individuals or corporations that give money. And often these people either don't know what's going on or they are themselves highly ideological and out of tune with what what most Americans agree on.
And so the first problem is that with the ACLU, there's no mechanism of accountability between these interest groups and the general public in a way that there is with political parties in the general public. The second problem is that these interest groups almost by definition, are going to get more and more extreme over time, right? Because they usually they're founded for a certain purpose, they have a strong sense of mission. And that sense of mission tends to attract people who are ideologically aligned with that mission. So if it's the ACLU — first of all civil liberties, then it was civil rights, now it's what you might call — what you have called “Successor Ideology.” If it's environmentalism, who's gonna go work at the Environmental Defense Fund, who is going to go work at at the UN — all these organizations: environmentalists, people who are very, very gung ho about environmentalism, and importantly, people who are willing to impose very costly policies on the public, because the kind of trade offs that they're willing to accept are much more extreme than the kind of trade offs that the average citizen would accept.
So these groups, the ACLU, for example, will attract young, very ideological, very woke lawyers — people like Chase Strangio to its ranks and promote them. And so gradually, over time, these groups tend to become more and more extreme in their positions. And because of the way in which the American political system gives them so much power and so much leverage over the policy process, we end up with the politics of radical policymaking. So it's not that other countries don't have similar problems. But here in the United States, because of how our system of government works, these problems tend to be much more extreme and much more intractable.”
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Michael Biggs is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oxford University and the author of a series of important studies of pediatric gender medicine in the UK. The studies created much of the evidentiary foundation now on the academic record about the still very young field of pediatric gender medicine today. The publicity surrounding his research in turn served as the impetus for the governmental inquiry into that country’s only pediatric gender clinic, culminating in the issuance of an order shuttering the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service in July of 2022.
Biggs’ studies revealed, among other things, that a longitudinal study launched by the Tavistock into the effects of puberty blockers on gender dysphoric youth had resulted in increasing levels of depression and suicidality in those whose psychic distress the drugs were ostensibly being used to relieve. The service hid the results that proved that the ongoing practice was harmful on balance and continued undeterred by evidence with the dramatic expansion of the practice outside of the research context that was its initial pretext to be permitted at all.
In other words, Biggs had proven that the Tavistock knew it was doing harm when it practiced “gender affirming care.”
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Biggs began his investigations into gender ideology soon after being admonished by an American student in a graduate seminar he led that featured discussion of a Guardian article on the rising number of transgender identified youth. “Things were said in that discussion that should not have been have been said,” Biggs recalled the student warning him.
“That was first my encounter with this kind of student woke activism, saying that we shouldn’t discuss things… As somebody whose job is to look into things and look into truth and look into reality, it's my job to probe that. If you tell me I can't look into something, that’s when I want to look into it.” It did not take long for Biggs to discover what was being hidden behind the demands not to look — a vast complex of spurious dogma and corrupted research that did not survive reasoned scrutiny. He has swiftly set about dismantling this corpus in dryly understated but ruthlessly unsparing prose.
I met with Biggs at the Genspect: the Bigger Picture conference in Killarney, Ireland in April, where he gave a presentation on his puberty blocker research. I had a wide-ranging conversation with him about the trajectory that brought him into the gender issue and the wider sea change in attitudes enabling the ongoing takeover of academia by acolytes of the ongoing non-electoral politics of institutional capture that we refer to at Year Zero as the Successor Ideology.
As always, a full transcript will be made available to paid subscribers. I’ll also be turning this interview, along with close readings of some of his key papers into a feature story, and posting an abridged video version of this interview to both the Substack and my YouTube channel for the visual leaners in the audience…
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Back in 2018, Adam Mortara repeatedly told Massachusetts District Court Judge Allison Burroughs that the case he was arguing sought to prove that Harvard had discriminated against Asian Americans, not to end the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Last week, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court made scant reference to the underlying district court case in the course of ruling that the use of race as a factor in college admissions was constitutionally impermissible.
The landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard University provides an authoritative declaration by the highest court in the land that the United States has a colorblind constitution. The declaration arrives at the very moment when the critique of colorblindness has obtained hegemony within our educational and cultural apparatuses, serving as the predicate for a cascade of increasingly brazen violations of civil rights law undertaken by schools, governments, hospitals, and major corporations. I talk to Mortara about how we got from the original district court case to the end of affirmative action and whether the powerful elite consensus generative of so much lawless action in recent years will be brought to heel by this ruling.
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Joseph Burgo is a psychoanalyst and author and a co-director of Genspect, an organization representing thousands of parents of children caught up in the ongoing transgender social contagion. The organizatioin now seeks to supplant the World Professional Association of Transgender Health as an authoritative source of guidance for how to deal with gender dysphoric youth.
Burgo gave a talk at the Genspect: the Bigger Picture conference in April, held concurrently and in the same city as the annual gathering of the European branch of WPATH, titled Autogynephilia, and the Sexualization of Shame which I published at this Substack last month.
We had a conversation presented here in podcast form, soon to be posted at the Year Zero YouTube channel, which I encourage everyone to follow, as I’ll be posting videos there more regularly.
As always, full transcripts of audio interviews are available to paid subscribers.
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Some excerpts:
Wesley Yang
Let’s talk about the standard definition of what autogynephilia is. How did we come to know that this was a condition at all and what is it?
Joseph Burgo
It's very simple, it's men's sexual arousal at the idea or image of themselves as a woman. They are what we used to think as fetishistic cross-dressers — men who dress up in women's clothes and get off on it sexually. We know this from Ray Blanchard, who came up with the two types of transsexuals, the homosexual transsexual and the autogynephilic transsexual. Mike Bailey wrote about it, and Anne Lawrence did an exhaustive study on autogynephilia. What I find really frustrating is that these histories are really accounts of a fetish. I think of what Anne Lawrence wrote as the account of a fetish. It’s all about the fetish — the history of the fetish, when it appeared, how it affects their sex life and their relationships, with no sense that it means something. I mentioned in my paper that Anne Lawrence had collected all this data, and then deleted the lengthy family histories of these guys, as if it were peripheral to her study. I find it enormously frustrating. But I do think that's the way the mental health profession is these days. The idea that symptoms have meaning, that they might have an unconscious significance that can be sorted out; that it's a way of resolving internal conflict, or it represents some defensive compromise. People don't think that way anymore, I do feel kind of like a dinosaur these days.
Wesley Yang
In liberal enclaves like this, especially in ones that are surrounded by red hinterlands, they just accept the next new thing immediately. They don't question them. “Yeah, being born in the wrong body? That makes perfect sense to us.”
Were you already in tension and crisis with peers and with the school administration as a result?
Joseph Burgo
We didn't have much to do with the school administration. I was set back, and I didn't really know how to cope with this. I approached the people that I thought would help. I think I speak for parents all over America who are having exactly this experience: the mental health professionals will tell you that you need to affirm your child's identity, and you're a bigot. We consulted with the endocrinologist just to get an idea of what the reality was of these drugs. I said to her, just in passing, that it's kind of frustrating that I can't find anybody who's willing to look at the mental health aspects of this, what else might be going on. She looked at me with utter contempt, and said, “You’re not going to find that.” Like, “What an outlandish idea that there's a meaning to these symptoms.” It was really humiliating and awful.
Wesley Yang
Incredible. You're a credentialed medical professional within this field, a colleague, and you have standing within that community. The consensus had coalesced to the point where your reflexive belief that, “of course, no one is born in the wrong body,” had already made you a pariah.
Joseph Burgo
Totally. This has a chilling effect on the profession. A number of people at the conference talked about this, and I know lots of people who won't go anywhere near gender because it's just too fraught. Or they've jumped on the affirmative bandwagon and have built practices affirming children, which is unconscionable to me, but they do it.
Wesley Yang
There are many states that have bans, I guess North Carolina doesn’t, on what they call conversion therapy. Meaning if you help a child be comfortable in their own body, you are converting them from this fleeting psychological sense that they might be a member of the opposite sex, which we're going to reify and entrench as if it's their true identity and any deviation from it is a crime.
Joseph Burgo
Which is an absolutely insane position. It’s actually the opposite of what's true. One of the things I'm very upset about is that a lot of these gender nonconforming kids who would grow up to be gay or lesbian are being converted to trans. That's the real conversion therapy. I used to sit on the board of directors and was an officer and friends with everybody at my LGBT center where I live. When I dove into this space, I gave them an article I'd written and I said, “Do you want me to step down?” These are my friends and they said, “Yes, please go away.” They’d all jumped on board with the trans thing. It's the LGBT Center but now everything is trans. This was my big question: what if they're gay and not trans. And I'm treated like, “Go away.”
Wesley Yang
You’re still able to practice. They didn't cancel and destroy you, or they didn’t try to, or they didn’t succeed at it.
Joseph Burgo
The fortunate thing is that I'm at a point in my career where I have enough money. I’m in private practice. They can't really cancel me. What are they going do to me?
Joseph Burgo
And it justifies any kind of violence on your behalf, coming from you. The book I want to write next is really an update of Lasch. He diagnosed America famously as suffering from a narcissistic disorder. I think what we've got now is a culture that suffers from borderline personality disorder. My most recent essay, Living In An As If World, looks at the way this kind of detachment from reality, this “as if” existence that we're living where you can just make it up as you go along, is leading to detachment from reality, but also, increasingly, borderline behavior where borderline rage, vicious assaults, attempts to destroy people, which is kind of what borderlines are like, is widespread. It dominates Twitter, for sure. Twitter is like nonstop borderline rage all the time. I do think there's a cultural pathology that's gotten much, much worse. Even though I say the tide has turned, I think, “Can we really pull out? Can we pull back when the society is this ill?” I don't know.
Wesley Yang
What is borderline personality disorder and how do you see it manifesting in the culture?
Joseph Burgo
The personality disorders, particularly borderline personality disorder, are characterized by an unstable sense of self that vacillates back and forth between feeling like you’re superior and feeling like you're trash. It’s unstable emotional states, frequent outbursts of rage, when you are challenged or when you aren't validated. These people are prone to various kinds of addictions. They have a hard time forming realistic and lasting relationships. They tend to blow up their friendships and family relationships. These features sound, to me, a lot like the way trans rights activists behave. They really are the embodiment of a cluster B personality disorder, particularly borderline personality disorder. If you take it just on the way people respond to one another in space, the way people will be enraged about nothing and take other people down. They will feel slighted and go off in an explosive way. I think social media really is characterized by borderline kinds of communication.
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A small group of writers attended two conferences on gender held concurrently in Killarney, Ireland in April. One was the annual meeting of the European affiliate of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, known as EPATH. The other was the first gathering of an upstart organization called Genspect, which declared itself a rival to WPATH by scheduling a conference right down the road. Genspect urges an open-ended and exploratory approach to gender distress that contrasts with the immediate affirmation and push to medicalize that characterizes the WPATH model.
Eliza Mondegreen wrote two reports on those conferences. Lisa Selin Davis did the same. Corinna Cohn, who began a course of estrogen at 18 and underwent sex reassignment surgery at 19, is the author of a Washington Post op-ed describing transition regret and has been active in seeking a carefully gatekept diagnostic protocol for gender dysphoric patients. Cohn testified before the Texas State Senate in support of a ban on pediatric gender medicine, telling Texas lawmakers “My heart breaks for the young people who are being lied to by well-meaning enablers, as they will need to learn the same painful lesson that I learned.” The lawmakers that Cohn addressed voted to approve passage of the ban on medically transitioning minors that Cohn had urged them to support.
Readers of both Davis’ and Mondegreen’s post on the EPATH conference know they arrived at very different assessments of the event, with Davis finding grounds to be encouraged and hopeful, while Mondegreen came away with a bleaker prospect. I will also be weighing in on what I thought and felt while witnessing the inauguration of a new chapter in the unfolding story of the Twilight Zone-like unreality that has enveloped the Western world. In this chapter, the forces of reason and reality begin to challenge the enormous agglomeration of wealth, power, and influence that has been deployed on behalf of the obscurantism and error that currently masquerades as the vanguard of humanity.
Prior to the composition of those pieces, Davis, Mondegreen, Cohn, and I met on the last night of the Genspect conference to debrief and share our impressions. There is a spontaneity and immediacy to these exchanges worth experiencing even for those who have already read Mondegreen’s and Davis’ posts. Audio is free to listen to; paid subscribers have access to a transcript. I’ll also be releasing an abridged version of the exchange on YouTube and Twitter.
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This is an abridged, 15-minute excerpt of my conversation with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted for paid subscribers only. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode, read the transcript, and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions.
This is the fourth episode in the Syllabus series, wherein I do a deep dive into a subject with an academic expert.
R. Shep Melnick, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government, has put together a syllabus of readings that we will be working through on the subscriber-only Syllabus podcast series. Every few weeks we’ll do another reading together.
This week, we’re discussing Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Harvard University Press, 1983), chs. 1-3.
Next episode we will be reading: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, trans. and ed, Delba Winthrop and Harvey C. Mansfield (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Vol. II, Part I, chs. 1-2; Part II, chs. 1-8; Part IV, ch. 6.
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"…it’s just as easily going to encroach on any other categorization that we've ever recognized in law as needed to help particular groups with defined characteristics - people with disabilities, people of certain ages - need different things in law. Race, color and national origin - every single category that we've ever identified and distinguished among people for the purpose of providing accommodation or special legal attention to what they might need, in order to have opportunities equal to people without their characteristics. All of that is in jeopardy if the law throws out references and reference points to objective or measurable qualities in favor of each individual person's self declaration about themselves."
In today’s episode of CURRENT EVENTS IN YEAR ZERO I talk with Candice Jackson, former Acting Assistant Secretary of Education, about Title IX, gender ideology, and the integrity of civil rights law.
Listen on Substack or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google | RSS.
Become a paid subscriber to receive transcripts of all audio content across platforms.
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“So the basic claim is that, okay, there may have been this need, contingently, one time, for the court to act; but if you create a super weapon, it's something that whoever gets control of it, will find a tempting, non-democratic way of getting their policy done. That's what the Lochner era had been about. That's what the liberals used it for, instead of taking civil rights, gender equality to the country, and saying, ultimately, this is something on which we have to find a way to convince our fellow citizens, they relied on the super weapon. And of course, as you would predict, the Empire struck back. And really since the 1970s, the Supreme Court is a story in this last phase of the conservatives struggling and succeeding in getting control of that super weapon.”
Today’s podcast once again interrupts the retrospective gaze at the online culture war of the ROAD TO YEAR ZERO series and the pedagogical approach of the SYLLABUS and soon to be launched REMEDIAL READING series to catch up with current events, as we periodically will when current events both become pressing and can benefit from a longer run perspective.
This week I spoke with Samuel Moyn, professor of history and law at Yale University, and author of the book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, about the recent Dobbs decision and what he regards as the misguided reliance on the Supreme Court as an instrument of progressive change.
And finally, a reminder to become a paid subscriber and get a head start on the reading for the next episode of the Syllabus Series: Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Harvard University Press, 1983), chs. 1-3.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
This is an abridged, 20-minute excerpt of the interview with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted for paid subscribers only. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions.
This is the third episode in the Syllabus series, wherein I do a deep dive into a subject with an academic expert.
R. Shep Melnick, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government, has put together a syllabus of readings that we will be working through on the subscriber-only Syllabus podcast series. Every 3-4 weeks we’ll do another reading together.
This week, we’re discussing Hugh Heclo’s essay “The Sixties’ False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policymaking,” Journal of Policy History, vol. 8, 1996.
Become a paid subscriber and get a head start on our next reading: Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Harvard University Press, 1983), chs. 1-3.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
Early adopters of the Yang Extended Universe as it moves into the audio realm are familiar with my scripted podcast, that you can listen to here on Substack, but I also have another weekly show, Conversations in Year Zero, conducted on the app Callin, in which I get to interact with my audience. I’ve noticed in the past few sessions that the size of those participating has begun to grow, and I hope to have it continue to grow as time passes.
The Callin show is a venue for unscripted and spontaneous conversation, often with an interviewee but sometimes with just me. So today’s episode of the Year Zero podcast includes some highlights from the first 18 episodes of my Callin show —we discuss the new religion of the American elite, Tumblr true believers, and the future of free speech with some interesting people. Thank you to everyone who’s participated in the show so far, and I look forward to new listeners enriching future episodes with your own participation.
You can listen to other Conversations in Year Zero on Callin, or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google
Become a paid subscriber to my Substack to receive transcripts of all audio content across platforms.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
In today’s episode of The Road to Year Zero we pick up right where we left off in our conversation with Jonathan Chait.
At the time of our interview, Chait was working on a piece exploring the current state of the culture, since, as he put it “a wave of illiberal norms around the discussion of race and gender began to hit an expanding array of progressive institutions” seven or eight years ago, and arguing that we had hit yet another inflection point in the year 2022.
In the prior episode, The Road to Year Zero #3: Chait v. The Internet, we published excerpts of the interview that focused on his 2015 piece, and the sudden and spontaneous responses generated against him at the time, and have been waiting to post the second part of the interview until his new piece was published.
Now that his article is out, we're going to continue the interview right where we left off in the last episode. We'll discuss whether rumors of a vibe shift are real, the weakness of wokeness, why you see so many editorials in the New York Times lamenting cancel culture, and why Chait believes this is going to be a self-ending phenomenon.
Listen on Substack or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google | RSS. Become a paid subscriber to my Substack to receive transcripts of all audio content across platforms.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
"I think it's different because it's fundamentally a sort of liberal Civil War, in which both parties, that is to say, pro-choice activists and pro-life activists, really think of themselves in an actually remarkably similar way. Both sides think of themselves as human rights Crusaders, who are charged with expanding the frontiers of human freedom, human equality. And so they really think of themselves in some senses, children of the declaration, in that grand liberal heritage and tradition that extends back to abolitionists, that extends back to civil rights activists."
"I think there's something sort of utopian about the pro-life point of view, as well. Right. I mean, I think it asks too much of us in some ways. And that it, in a weird kind of way, it demands a kind of rationalism, that I think is too heavy of a lift. It demands that we, for purely philosophical reasons, really, believe that the tadpole has the same moral status as the, you know, the neonate. And even for folks who can get there philosophically, it's a hard stretch to get there sentimentally, and so we tend to, so I think it's, it's a crusade that I think total victory for them is, in some ways, contrary to our own nature."
"And we know this, lots of pro-choice thinkers think it was bad law. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her way, thought it was bad law. She described the decision as breathtaking. And I think I'm really sympathetic to all of that. I mean, that was a decision that created this, you know, sweeping right to abortion really through all nine months of pregnancy. And, and it really did, I mean, hate to use this word because it gets used incorrectly. But I do think it did sort of disenfranchise a lot of Americans - disenfranchise in the sense that suddenly, you know, in the morning of January 22, 1973, you had lots of Americans who woke up and discovered that they couldn't really vote on this issue anymore."
— Jon A. Shields, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College
Today’s podcast interrupts the retrospective gaze at the online culture war of the ROAD TO YEAR ZERO series and the pedagogical approach of the SYLLABUS and soon to be launched REMEDIAL READING series to catch up with current events, as we periodically will when current events both become pressing and can benefit from a longer run perspective
Today we’ll be talking with Jon A. Shields about his NYT op-ed on the national compromise on abortion perceptible in the polling data, and about the broader future of the Christian Right at the moment of its triumph.
Listen on Substack or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google | RSS. Become a paid subscriber to receive transcripts of all audio content across platforms.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
This is an abridged, 30-minute excerpt of the interview with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted yesterday for paid subscribers only. It is the second episode of the subscriber-only Syllabus series. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions.
This is the second episode in the Syllabus series, wherein I do a deep dive into a subject with an academic expert.
R. Shep Melnick, Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government, has put together a syllabus of readings that we will working through on the subscriber-only Syllabus podcast series. Every 3-4 weeks we’ll do another reading together.
This episode we discuss Robert A. Kagan’s essay “Adversarial Legalism and American Government.”
Other readings mentioned in this episode:
Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril’s 1967 book The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion
Jonathan Rauch’s Jul/Aug 2016 article in The Atlantic, "How American Politics Went Insane"
Daniel P. Moynihan's Iron Law of Emulation theory in "Imperial Government." Commentary, Jun. 1978
Jamal Greene’s 2021 book How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart
Next episode we will be reading Hugh Heclo, “The Sixties’ False Dawn: Awakenings, Movements, and Postmodern Policymaking,” Journal of Policy History, vol. 8, 1996.
A full transcript of our conversation is available for paid subscribers. Listen on Substack or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google | RSS.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
Today’s episode of the Road to Year Zero Podcast looks back at the publication of Jonathan Chait’s February 2015 New York Magazine cover story, NOT A VERY P.C. THING TO SAY, which both registered the recrudescence of political correctness and summoned up a response illustrative of a new balance of forces within media and affiliated institutions. I talk with Chait about that curious inflection point in the culture wars which was at once striking in its blessed innocence and prophetic of the world to come.
Discussed: Nicholas Christakis’s Struggle Session; the bien pensants respond to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre; the rise to ascendancy of Ta-Nehisi Coates
A full transcript of our conversation is available for paid subscribers. Listen on Substack or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google | RSS.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
This is an abridged, 20-minute excerpt of the original, one hour and twenty-five minute interview with Boston College professor of political science Shep Melnick posted yesterday for paid subscribers only. It is the first episode of the subscriber-only Syllabus series. Become a paid subscriber to hear the rest of this episode and maintain access to a growing archive of independent study sessions.
This is the inaugural episode of the Syllabus series, wherein I do a deep dive into a subject with a distinguished academic who provides me with a syllabus and does an independent study with me that will be posted at Year Zero for paid subscribers. Each episode will begin with a short lecture on the assigned reading, followed by a discussion in which I act as surrogate for the audience.
Here I am talking to Boston College law professor Shep Melnick about his book, The Transformation of Title IX, which is a kind of Rosetta Stone of the legal and administrative regime that serves as the font from which Successor Ideology flows. It is one of the most important single works for those seeking an understanding of the intellectual history of the Road to Year Zero.
Next episode we’ll be reading Robert A. Kagan’s essay “Adversarial Legalism and American Government.”
A full transcript of our conversation is available for paid subscribers. Listen on Substack or subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple | Spotify | Google | RSS.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe -
Still evoking the mood and atmospherics of the early days of the ideological succession.
A reflection on the following piece, and a dramatic recitation, by me of my own work: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/03/we-out-here/
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A full transcript is available for those paid subscribers reluctant to take in information through their ears.
All the original music on these episodes consists of music written and recorded by me.
This one has my singing voice on it.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wesleyyang.substack.com/subscribe - Vis mere
