Olohan EDITED audio

The Anchoring Truths Podcast discusses the book "Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult" by Mary Margaret Olihan. The book explores the experiences of detransitioners and the abuse they have endured, including therapy, mental anguish, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts. Olihan, a reporter, shares her challenges in writing a book compared to writing news stories. She emphasizes the emotional journey of getting to know the individuals featured in the book and the importance of sharing their stories. The book also examines the concept of "gender affirming care" and the media's role in hiding the truth about gender ideology. This program is brought to you by the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights in the American Founding. If you would like to learn more about the James Wilson Institute, please visit jameswilsoninstitute.org. We hope you enjoy the program. Hello and welcome to the Anchoring Truths Podcast. I'm your host, Garrett Snedeker. Friends, today's episode concerns a subject that's difficult to talk about publicly and, frankly, even to discuss privately. Nevertheless, we feel obligated to discuss it on our podcast. Detrans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, is an in-depth look at a collection of detransitioners. The book's author is Mary Margaret Olihan, our guest on today's episode. Based on in-depth personal interviews, detrans exposes the unconscionable abuse these detransitioners have endured, from therapy sessions, mental and emotional anguish, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts. Detrans is indispensable evidence of the life-shattering power of gender ideology. Ms. Olihan is a senior reporter at the Daily Signal and a veteran reporter at the Daily Caller. She's a graduate of the Catholic University of America. Detrans is her first book. We hope you enjoy the show. Mary Margaret Olihan, we are delighted to have you as our guest on the Anchoring Truths Podcast to discuss your new book, Detrans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. Before we get into a discussion of your book, our listeners should know that this is your first book and you are a reporter. So what was it like going from writing stories to instead writing a book to give our listeners just a sense for what the writing process was like for you? Well, it was challenging and, you know, normally as a reporter, when I write a story, typically I will try and turn it around the same day. And that's something that most reporters, especially in conservative media, I think, are used to, where you just turn out stories and if it's a more investigative one, it might take a week or a few weeks. But the sense for you is one of urgency, that it needs to go up very quickly. So this was a challenge for me because not only did I have about a six-month deadline to try and write this while I was also working a full-time job, I also knew that it wasn't going to go up anytime soon. So as the events related in the world news or in the culture and politics were unfolding, I would sometimes think, okay, I'm going to include this, but, you know, this book isn't going to come out for another year. So that was a little hard mentally to think, okay, we've got to relax, this is all important, but we can't fit everything. So I really tried to focus on the stories of the detransitioners that are in the book and really keep it centralized and focused on them because the news cycle is constantly changing and developing and it's very hard to keep up with. This also must have been, I mean, it is a subject that you covered as a reporter, but it must have been particularly difficult for you because of the nature of the subjects that you were reporting on and also the individuals. Can you talk a little bit about how getting to know each of the figures at the heart of your book was perhaps like an emotional journey of your own to try and weave together stories that were similar but also radically different in various aspects? Yeah, this was an emotional project. I knew when I was starting out that it was going to be heavy, but I didn't think that I myself would become so emotionally invested in each of these stories. And I spent many hours on the phone talking to different detransitioners about what they had been through and some of the things that we talked about, depending on the individual, I'm not totally sure that they had talked about at length before. And so that in and of itself was deeply moving to me, realizing that in some of these cases, I was part of a young person or a new adult discovering things about a story in their own lives that they might not have had the opportunity to think about before. And so that was a privilege to be able to help these people work through some different things. And I did, you know, there were at different moments in time where I would say, I think you might want to talk to someone about this, you know, I think you might want to talk to your parent more about this, because I certainly am not a professional that's suited for that type of help or care. But it was also just very emotional to be able to share these stories with the world because these are not stories that the establishment media is willing to share. I think we've gotten to a point, thankfully, where the Washington Post and the New York Times are, they're more open to talking about detransitioners, given the very public nature of their stories at this point. But they're still going to caveat it by saying that most people don't regret their gender transition and that Republicans have weaponized anti-trans rhetoric, etc, etc. And so my hope here was to say, okay, I don't care where you stand on this issue. Here's what actually happened to Chloe Cole. Here's what actually happened to Preisha Mosley. Here's what it was like when Preisha woke up from her double mastectomy and her parents took her back to recover at a hotel. Here's how her mother had to wash her wounds and they cried over it together. Those kinds of details are not ones you're ever going to hear from establishment media because they don't want you to know those things. And I think a book is a great place to share those types of details because even in a news story, an investigative piece, you can't share all of that. You certainly can't in a quick news hit on Fox News or something. So this seems like a good format to really get into the nitty gritty. And that's what we did. And I'm grateful to all the people that I talked to for this book who let me ask invasive questions and let me push deeper and include a lot of these vulnerable moments that I'm sure some of them just wanted to keep close to the chest, but for the good of other people who might be suffering in the same way that they were, they shared. No, that's I think that's quite, quite poignant and that so many of the stories that you that you share in this book are coming from a place of deep, deep regret. But for all of these figures, they were told that what they were receiving was care. Yeah. And so I thought maybe we would dive into your book in a way you get into this in the introduction to your book. But it's sort of the larger frame for why this is going on, why the medical establishment has embraced this, why parents are largely deferential to them and why and why these individuals who are searching for answers are embracing it. It's this understanding of care, which I think stems from a larger trend in the West towards like the triumph of the therapeutic. Why do you why are you why do you start your book with unpacking this term care as it's understood in the context of detransitioning and I guess like transitioning in the first place? I think that it's partially because this is how I got started becoming interested in the issue in the first place with my journey reporting on gender affirming care. It was around 2020, 2021 when my one of my bosses put me on a story about gender affirming care. And I had already been seeing the term pop up a lot and I didn't know what it meant. And my boss at the time didn't really either. But we both had the same general understanding that, A, this was important and it was about to become even more important. And B, that's just a good story. If there's a term popping up and people don't know what it is, that's a great story. So I did some research and I talked to some experts and I did some digging. And at the time, gender affirming care is so nebulous that I wondered if it just meant something to do with socially transitioning a kid because we kept hearing this in the context of trans youth need gender affirming care. So we thought, OK, like these activists are very radical, but they're probably not talking about surgeries. They couldn't be. And as I did my research, I began to realize, oh, my gosh, this isn't just about social transitioning. This is about not just puberty blockers, not just hormones, but also surgeries, even when we're talking about kids. And so from my work on that story, I became very sensitive to mentions in the media of gender affirming care. And I was just blown away by how our media, it's not just that they're using AP style, they're fully engaged in hiding what's going on with gender ideology. And every time I see it now, and I think once you once you start paying attention, you can't really stop because, for example, the Associated Press will cover a story about Ohio trying to protect kids from trans surgeries and hormones and puberty blockers. But the way the Associated Press will cover it is they'll say Republicans are passing an anti-trans law that bans trans care for or bans gender affirming care for trans youth. And I think part of the implication there is that Republicans, they want people to think that Republicans are banning care for trans youth and they want it to be nebulous. They want it to sound like, you know, have your average American wondering if trans youth can't get antibiotics for strep throat or something like that. But that is the hope there. And you'll see that when they even drop gender affirming and just say trans youth can't access care in Florida or something like that. And so that made me really sensitive to the whole euphemism gender affirming care. And I was seeing it everywhere in the way that all these reporters were using it. So I started calling them out, you know, on Twitter. I would say I would tag them and say, hey, I don't know, like random Bob Smith. Why did you write this story this way? You waited until paragraph 17 to even explain what gender affirming care is. Why did you do that? Did your editor OK that or did you just like think of all this yourself? And so I was very sensitive to all of that. And when I started seeing the transitioners popping up everywhere and sharing their stories on social media, I immediately knew that I wanted to be telling these stories because not just because they're compelling and so important and these people have been through really, really hard things, but because there's an active attempt to hide them and to block them out. And to me, whenever I see something like that, I think we got to talk about that more because there's a very organized machine to cover up certain aspects of the culture wars. And they're so they're so in the wrong. And I think just shining light on the truth is the best way to overcome that. Yeah. Just so our listeners might be able to connect things that they've read to the relevance of your book, many of our listeners are lawyers, probably in the right of center legal movement. And there was a pretty notable opinion written by a Sixth Circuit judge not too long ago. It was a case coming out of some various cases in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and the Sixth Circuit. And this was Judge Jeff Sutton wrote an opinion that largely upheld the state regulations that would have put up serious barriers to these surgeries for minors. But Sutton did a very, you know, helpful analysis of why it was not for the states to offload responsibility to grappling with the realities of what we're, you know, what we're at issue, you know, in these pieces of legislation, the actual surgeries that were being formed, offload analysis of these to credentialing organizations like WPATH. How did you kind of in your understanding of sort of the ecosystem that, you know, these these surgeries are happening, how did you come to understand the role of these credentialing organizations as performing kind of a laundering of influence or like a laundering of credibility to what was going on in such a I think in such a rapid timeframe? It was one of the most disturbing parts of all of this. And you mentioned WPATH, the World Professional Transgender Health Organization or whatever that acronym actually stands for. We just recently found out that this organization, which is considered one of the top medical organizations and related to gender ideology. Those doctors were well aware that young girls, for example, struggling severely with mental health problems, can't fully consent to surgeries, hormones, puberty blockers. They were aware that testosterone was making girls infertile, that it was causing tumors in their female patients. But they were keeping all of these things a secret and discussing them internally while externally praising gender affirming care and praising efforts to help trans youth and not acknowledging some of the realities that they were finding out, namely that all of this is experimental. And when you see the way the establishment media covers these types of stories, they'll always say every major medical organization says that trans youth need gender affirming care. And WPATH is one of these so-called major medical organizations that is saying that trans youth need gender affirming care. And I think that's a good example of how these medical experts are misleading and enabling this gender ideology movement right now because they are well aware of the implications of what's going on to just choosing not to talk about it. And their literature, their condonement is allowing this to continue and allowing experts to cite them and to push their work in a way that enables youth to be accessing these things. So I think that until we see some kind of reckoning for these medical organizations, we're not going to see much slowing down of the movement in the U.S. because we're just so embattled right now. We're so focused on pushing this type of thing and praising the doctors and organizations that are enabling it that we seem to be very far behind Europe in this avenue because European countries are really putting a halt on all of this. They're slowing down gender transitions for children, whereas in the United States we seem hell-bent on making it only more accessible. So one of the notable legal moves that you document in the book is this lowering of standard where the surgeons and the counselors that are involved in these surgeries now, they follow what is understood as informed consent. And yet you document in the book how this sort of downgrading of culpability, putting basically the responsibility on the parents and the children in the minors context, or just the patient in general, is radically different with how this used to be treated. So why does there seem to be a clear connection between the lowering of the standards to informed consent and then the proliferation of these procedures? Well, I think part of that is because informed consent is allowing all these young people to obtain these procedures and young people don't have the wherewithal to understand what they're signing up for. So, for example, Chloe Cole, when she underwent a double mastectomy and was getting on testosterone, had no idea that testosterone would potentially render her infertile. She had no idea that she might want to breastfeed her babies one day. She had no idea whether she wanted to have babies one day. She was a 13-year-old, 14-year-old girl. So she was not able to fully consent to these procedures. And I think there's a knowledge that that is the case. And of course, since she was a minor, her parents had to sign off on this as well. But they were not able to fully consent, given that they were not given all the information about what their daughter was getting into. And I think this is documented really well in their lawsuit. They're represented by Harmony Dillon, and at length, it describes how Chloe wasn't able to give informed consent and her parents weren't able to give informed consent because none of them were given the full picture. And that, I think, is partially because nobody really has the full picture. We don't really know the full implications of testosterone on a young girl's body. We don't have the full understanding of how puberty blockers are going to affect a young girl's body. We do know that both of them are going to really mess up her body and potentially render her infertile, potentially cause her to grow tumors, as WPATH found out, and more. But I think beyond Chloe, there's many examples of detransitioners who were so mentally struggling and suffering from such mental illness that the idea that they could give informed consent was preposterous. There's been examples of young girls who have told doctors after their double mastectomies, so how long until they grow back? Like, there's no understanding here of what's actually going on because we're dealing with young kids and teenagers who are obviously historically naive, not fully aware of what's going on. They're kids. They still need to be cared for. But these gender activists are suggesting that they should have full autonomy and full ability to decide on very big picture things. And to circle back to informed consent a little bit, because I am veering off your question, I asked a whole bunch of top medical organizations in the country to fill me in on their informed consent model and why they made the decisions they made to put that out there as the standard for these types of procedures. And I have a whole list of them that I reached out to, including John Hopkins, I believe Georgia, Georgia, I'm blanking on what the top ones were, but John Hopkins was first and foremost. And I believe there were eight others that I reached out to. And almost all of them said, no, said, we are not going to talk to you about this. So I was, frankly, surprised that they got back to me at all. Sometimes places like that just won't answer you. But I was given, no, we will not talk to you about this. And I believe I included a gender activist or specialist in the book who explains why informed consent is a great model for these types of surgeries and procedures, because it just basically clears the path for people to access them. It makes it so there's less hurdles to jump through and, in short, speeds up the process. And if you believe that gender affirming care is going to, is going to fix the problems of people with gender dysphoria, I suppose it makes sense to clear the path. But if you understand all the implications of so-called gender affirming care, it should frighten us all that it is so easy to access it. So this is this is quoting from your book in the chapter on getting hormones, quote, it is this claim that slowing down the transition process worsens gender dysphoria that appears to have led to the informed consent model. Activists like Trans Feminine University of Toronto Faculty of Law doctoral student Florence Ashley, who has authored a number of academic pieces on the topic, claim that slowing down the process with the former cumbersome requirements is dehumanizing. According to Ashley, simply telling a physician that one has gender dysphoria combined with an informed consent process, quote, should suffice to obtain a prescription since gender dysphoria is distress or discomfort for those very features that people seeking the hormone HRT want to change. So this has been internalized now. Now, is there any way that we could see something like, well, what Dr. Paul McHugh did in the 70s, which was shut down the surgeries at Johns Hopkins? Or do you think that like beating this back is not going to come from within, but will only happen through like threat of lawsuits? Oh, absolutely. Threat of lawsuits. I think it's far too widespread now. And the fear within medical organizations and hospitals and medical institutions is just too strong. I mean, and we see this in the corporate world, too, right? There's just such a fear of even coming tangentially close to to a political issue like this. So it should not surprise us that within the medical world, there's just an absolute terror of being associated as anti-trans or not affirming trans youth. It's just the death knell to your career. So I think the lawsuits are absolutely the best way to be confronting this issue head on because, you know, the detransitioners without the lawsuits are sometimes very loath to actually name the therapists or the doctors who who got them in this mess. And they're smart not to because if they don't have a lawsuit behind them and a team of lawyers, that's a dangerous thing to do. And so these lawsuits are amazing because they name and shame all of the individuals who are involved, the medical organizations that were involved. They can lay out very, very crucially all of the details. And then I personally think they're doing a huge service to reporters who might struggle to work on these stories because then they offer all these details, different nuggets about informed consent, for example, or there was a story that I got out of a lawsuit once where I was just reading a lawsuit and I think I got maybe like four stories out of one lawsuit where I found out that there was a gender activist that was kind of being a predator towards a young girl at a gender shelter in, I want to say, Texas. That sounds horrific. Yeah. And that was just one little nugget that I pulled out of a lawsuit that, you know, I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't seen this legal filing. So the lawsuits are so phenomenal in so many ways. And I really hope to see more defending these detransitioners. Yeah. So on the lawsuit angle, obviously these detransitioners are the ones that bear the fullest brunt. But for the benefit of our listeners, they should know that we featured at one of our James Wilson Institute events, a whistleblower who was blowing the whistle on these surgeries happening, Dr. Eitan Heim, and his lawyer is representing him as one of our alumni of the Institute's fellowship program, Marcella Burke. All of these people take a tremendous amount of, you know, professional hits by by engaging in this. But they do so because I think they're just courageous, brave individuals who then also they kind of see that if not, if not now, when, if not ever, who? Do you agree? Absolutely. I think there's a recognition that they were made for such a time as this. Right. They're the ones who are in that place. They're the one that is specially equipped to be able to talk about it. And like you're saying, if not them, then who? And I think we're going to look back not not too far into the future at this period of time. And there's going to be a recognition of who is willing to put themselves on the line and take a stand for children and for our youth and who ignored all of the warning signs and pushed ahead. And there's going to be a reckoning sooner than later. And I personally am glad that I'm on the side that I've been on and I would not want to be the doctors and therapists and medical institutions that will be remembered as butchering children down the line. So one of the figures that the, you know, the broad, you know, the broad transgender movement they like to cite is that detransitioners represent a tiny percentage of the overall number of people who undergo these transitions in the first place. The number they like to cite is 1 percent. You dispute that number. You think the number is much higher. Absolutely. I don't want to I don't want to put you on the record of like, what number do you think it is? But what is your evidence for 1 percent being a vast undercounting? Well, I mean, first of all, Lisa Littman is a researcher who did some phenomenal work on this. And I think her work is what inspired Abigail Schreier to write Irreversible Damage or kind of got Abigail Schreier down this path into investigating what was going on with social contagion and girls identifying as trans in groups. And Abigail Schreier's book inspired me. I was working for Regnery Publishing when her book was first when she was writing her book. And I had left the company when it was published. I was already reporting. But I remember seeing that book and being so fascinated and inspired by it, largely because I'm from a big family. So whenever I see trends affecting younger girls, I'm very interested because I have a lot of sisters and I can see in real time how these types of things affect girls. So anyway, a little tangent there, but. Oh, it's a great it's a great book. She was she was on our podcast in 2020 when I think before she became kind of a household name and one of the most engrossing podcast episodes we've ever had. So no doubt we share your we share your admiration for what she's been able to do to not only popularize this, but also, you know, just do such original work and reporting. Absolutely. She's brilliant. And Lise Littman in her research found that I believe it was only 24 percent of people who detransitioned who actually went back to their doctors and said, I regretted this and I wish I didn't do it. And I will tell you, the detransitioners that I spoke with, they two of them, I'm specifically thinking of Abel and I want to say Chloe went back to the doctors who transitioned them. Of the medical professionals, and when they had realized that they had made a mistake, they tried to go back and get help. And Abel said that he was told this is just part of your gender journey. So the implication was all of this excruciating physical pain that you've been through to resolve the excruciating mental pain that you've been suffering from is just part of your gender journey and the gender journey is ongoing. And he was so insulted by this and just felt so invalidated by such a response that he didn't interact with that person again. And he also I believe he told me they were crazy. He was realizing in that moment, oh, they're insane because they're trying to tell me that these things that I had been through were still right and they're so clearly were wrong for me. And so in Littman's research, she found that so few detransitioners go back to the medical professionals who transitioned to them partially out of shame or embarrassment or they're just struggling so much that there's no reason that they would go back. And I like to compare it slightly to someone going back to someone who had abused them to tell that abuser, I regretted. I did not like that you abused me and I just want to let you know that it's something that definitely happens, but it is it would be rare. You know, it's just not a pleasant thing to go back to someone who did that to you in their sphere and shame and terror associated with that person and what they have done to you. So I'm not surprised at all that the rate that is reported is so low. And we know that gender activists love to commission surveys and polls that reflect what they want to hear. So I would love to see newer stats on on detransitioning and on the correlation between young people who seek puberty blockers, testosterone, estrogen and potentially surgeries and their mental health outcomes. I would like to see suicide outcomes. And I would also like to see the detransition rate from pollsters that are honest and not trying to rig questions a certain way, because that's that's that's so key to understanding polls nowadays is looking at the actual line of questioning. If you're polling people on this topic, let's say you're polling average Americans and saying, do you support gender affirming care? I don't care about that poll. That poll is trash. What you should be actually asking people is, do you support giving puberty blockers to a 12 year old girl who thinks that she is a boy? Do you support giving testosterone to a girl who thinks she's a boy? And then with a little caveat of the side effects, do you think that a girl in her teens should be allowed to get a double mastectomy if her parents say yes, because she believes she's a boy? Those are real questions that should be asked in polling, not do you support gender affirming care? And for the detransitioners or people who are undergoing surgical or hormonal transitions, there should be similarly blunt questions that aren't framing it in activist talking points designed to show certain outcomes. So one of the things that struck me in your writing, particularly about Chloe Cole, Chloe Cole is one of the more prominent detransitioners who, I mean, frankly, I think Chloe Cole wants to live her life and she doesn't want to always be thought of this. But I think right now she's sort of taking up this mantle of raising awareness of how there are many of us who are out there. We are not a vanishingly small percentage like the activist orgs want you to think. So Chloe Cole, in your interviews with her, noted that she's autistic, right? Yes. How did you find in your research for the book and your interviews, how often did you find certain characteristics about an individual who they might be autistic or something even less diagnosable? Like they might be a girl who's a tomboy. How many of these characteristics are now sort of being like open doors that are being like shoved through so that the recourse, especially among the psychiatric community, is not to deal with somebody who's autistic on those terms, but rather if there's even a crack open in the door to say, well, have you ever considered that you might be transgender? And here's all the litany of possibilities there. Right. In your own reporting and research, how often did you find these other characteristics that were co-present? And then sort of the wave of, I don't want to say enthusiasm, but like the wave of interest coming from operators in this ecosystem being such that there was this kind of momentum or push to encourage these, especially these minors, towards exploring transgender or transgender surgeries. Yeah, I think that there are often very similar factors present. And that was something I spent a good portion of the first half of the book on was the family situations and relationships and dynamics that these young people had. Because for starters, many, many of the young people nowadays who are transitioning are on the spectrum or suspect that they're on the spectrum, the autism spectrum. Many of them are lonely. They feel like they don't fit in at school. They feel like they don't look the way that they're supposed to look, especially the girls. This is something I found particularly fascinating is these girls are struggling with misconceptions of what they're supposed to be as a woman. And of course, we see this in the boys, too, and their misconceptions about what they're supposed to be as a man. But the girls really struggle on social media where they're seeing very perfect versions of these women that are just they seem unattainable to them. For example, autotune and face tuning and filters. And then the capacity that wealthy women nowadays have to alter their bodies and to look more beautiful. Little girls don't understand what's going into that. They don't understand that this is a woman who can focus a lot of her time and efforts on being artificially beautiful. What they think is, I don't look anything like that. I think that's what a woman is supposed to look like. Clearly, this woman is receiving all kinds of validation from people online, especially men. And I don't think I can live up to that. And then a lot of these girls were telling me that they would see depictions of women in pornography that scared them. They're being exposed way too early, thanks to the Internet and phones, to pornography. And they're seeing these sexual experiences and thinking that looks degrading and humiliating and terrifying. I was told by multiple girls that it looked like the women were not having fun and the men were. So when you combine that, this scary looking sexual experiences with this archetype of woman that seems unattainable and then you're being inundated with that type of material online all the time. And then you also are exposed to gender ideology online. It's just not very surprising that these girls would think, all right, this seems far easier to be a boy. And I think that I'm drawn to it more because I'm afraid of these depictions of womanhood. So that was something that I encountered a number of times with this this kind of terror of being a woman and an interest in being a man out of a desire to escape representation to femininity that they just didn't think they could live up to. But I will say across the board, what I was told was different people were scared, lonely, didn't have a lot of friends, definitely tomboys. But Helena Kirshner, for example, was pretty feminine. She was boy crazy, she said. She was constantly fixating on different boys having crushes. She never talked to them, but she would want to. And her hyper fixation on boys made her wonder if she herself was a boy, which I think is really sad because if she had had proper communication in her life and someone to say, no, you just you really like boys, you want a boyfriend. That could have really that could have been really trajectory changing for her. But unfortunately, she didn't. And she was living in a family that was not super communicative and didn't have super healthy dynamics. So and that's another aspect that I think is important to a lot of these young people were from families that were not necessarily thriving. I believe Luca's parents divorced while she was young. Precia had a troubled relationship with her mother and Chloe's siblings were all way older than her. So she was very lonely and alone. There's just a lot of family factors present that made these these young people feel like they had to turn to the Internet or seek help in places that they shouldn't have. But you don't broadly blame parents. You may be certain parents in certain circumstances are like worthy of condemnation. But you for the most part, you view parents as kind of in a position where there's just a significant weight of authority being impressed upon them. And then the threat, of course, of, you know, litigation may be separating like custody between the parent that might be more supportive of a transition for their child. And then, oh, yeah, that's less supportive. Yeah. Oh, for sure. I have so much empathy for parents in our modern culture. I mean, I'm one of 11 kids, so I understand a little bit. I'm on the top end of that family. And so I've seen a lot of what goes into parenting these days. And I will say from from what I learned from all these detransitioners and and their parents, some of whom I spoke with, is that these are people that loved their kids, that should have done more research. Absolutely should have put more less trust in doctors and medical professionals. But what they were told was this was going to help their child who was suffering. And I think that's something that we don't totally realize. It's not like this kid, these kids are just saying, I want to transition now. This is after they've been deeply suffering with mental health issues for a good bit. And so whether their gender dysphoria just springs up quickly or it took a little longer, they've already been suffering with mental health health issues and their parents have seen this. So they do genuinely want to help their kids and doctors and therapists take advantage of them by saying, would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son? Your kid is not going to get better without gender affirming care, which is a lie. But that's what they're told. And I think in certain cases, you know, there absolutely are selfish and narcissistic parents who push this type of thing on young kids and want to transition them out of desire to promote themselves. That is absolutely true. But in general, I think what what's happening, a lot of parents who love their kids are not super tuned into politics. They're not super tuned into the culture wars. And so when this happens, they're completely taken off guard and they take their kids to the doctor and to the therapist, hoping and trusting that they'll be helped. And instead, they're given gender ideology and lies. So, Mary Barger, we're coming to the end of our episode here. What kind of hopeful note would you want your readers to kind of, you know, take away from your from your book? I would like people to understand that these detransitioners are waging war on behalf of their younger selves. They're trying to protect other young people from going down the path that they did because they didn't have anyone to sound the alarm for them. And they know that they are the ones that need to do that now. You know, they were born for such a time as this. And their stories, I think, are the most powerful weapon against the gender ideology cult and their lawsuits are one of the most powerful weapons against the medical institutions that are perpetrating these things. And my hope with this book is that it allows people to get a glimpse into what they went through and understand the implications of gender transition, not just for young people, but for every person at every stage of life. And I hope that I wrote it in such a way that people on each side of the aisle can read it and understand what's going on here. You know, they can understand the ins and outs of gender transition and what motivates young people and how doctors and therapists are able to push these things. So I think we should be hopeful. I think that there are a lot of factors right now that should encourage us, such as the lawsuits, such as people like Chloe and Abel and Luca and Helena and Precia speaking up and all these laws all over the country that are being enacted to help children. So there's a lot of good things to keep an eye out for and a lot of ways to get involved. And I think this is, for the first time in a long time, a very positive moment fighting gender ideology. Again, the book is D-Trans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult. Mary Margaret, where can our listeners follow your work? Where can they keep up with your latest? Well, you can follow my work at DailySignal.com or on Twitter or ask at Mary Marg Olihan. And you can find the book on Amazon and is available for ordering now. Well, thank you again. This was a real treat and we're grateful for your time and in walking our listeners through the admirable service that you performed in documenting these, you know, these powerful stories. Thank you. It's really great to be here and I'm so grateful for you spreading the message. This program has been brought to you by the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. If you'd like to learn more about the James Wilson Institute, please visit jameswilsoninstitute.org. Thanks for listening.