"Here's the bottom line...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."
"Here's the bottom line...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."
Corinna Cohn had sex reassignment surgery at 19. He spent the spring and summer of 2023 urging state legislators to ban pediatric gender medicine. We talk about why.
Corinna captures the darkness and desolation I see coming toward affirming parents. I know two children irreparably harmed by pediatric gender medicine - a perfectly normal five-year-old boy transed by his mother for liking dolls and pink, and a young girl I watched grow up put on puberty blockers at 12, followed by testosterone and mastectomy. Brains, bodies, lives destroyed for what? The fantasies of men. Devastating.
I was watching an ostensibly unrelated YouTube essay the other day about the rise of the term "content" to refer to art (music, videos, movies, etc) streamed online, and it occured to me that the complete dominance not of that term per se but the mindset behind it – that ours is a culture not of art, or beauty, or love, or creativity but of commerce – is a perfect explanation for the spread of gender woo. A movie is no longer art, it's a fungible piece of material fed down the firehouse of business, sold (or not) to meet metrics and numbers and IPOs. And that we all adopted this worldview in unison about four or five years ago times perfectly with the view of the human body as raw material for a business pipeline.
"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"
This is such a critical point. Trans isn't about kids. It's not even about sex. (Well for some of our ruling class it might be -- court eunuchs have always been popular.) Trans is a proxy for whether reality exists.
"Reality is a social construct" is a cornerstone of postmodernism. That is why our ruling class will die on the "transwomen are women" hill. Because if "man" and "woman" have objective meanings, other words might too. Words like "parent", "family", "baby", "God", "good", "evil"... and hard definitions for those words will derail the progress that liberalism places as the highest good.
The new culture war makes a whole lot more sense once you realize it's the same old class war wearing a new coat.
“Moving beyond the troubled population” and normalizing queer identities is the point.
This is a classic Leftist political strategy: Exploit the plight of a minority group to advance a broad, unpopular political agenda.
They do this with literally every group/issue. American blacks are poor? Sweeping welfare state. Some women are impregnated by rape? State-funded abortion up until conception. A few children suffer from intense sexual dysphoria? No more limits on what can be done to help children achieve their “queer” identities.
When are we going to recognize this for what it is--emotional manipulation--and stop giving in to it?
Corinna may be right that sooner or later everyone who transitions will have to reckon with this realization... but I think he may be underestimating the extent to which he is just an unusually thoughtful and honest person. I was really impressed by the MichFest story. Some people can tolerate a lot more cognitive dissonance, for a lot longer, than he apparently could. It speaks well of him.
(Not even getting into the AGPs like Levine; I suspect it’s different for someone who transitions for sexual reasons, and some of them seem pretty self-aware.)
This is a phenomenal conversation. Thank you, Heterodork for your sincerity and honesty. I have to say, your comparison with the dentist/filling sitch really struck a nerve with me (see what I did there?) I’ve been attempting for the past several months to help my aging mother find healthcare providers who actually HELP her but am constantly met with “He’s so nice” and “She’s so kind” and the like. It’s maddening! Nice and kind seem to be a proxy for quality in her mind. I can’t seem to convince her that neither of those (very important) attributes constitute good, effective healthcare. Really every service and product provider in her sphere of reality need only meet those minimum standards for her to become a loyal-for-life customer. You verbalized this frustration perfectly. Best to you forever! You’re clearly so intelligent and thoughtful. You deserve peace of mind and true happiness. Someone will be fortunate to call you their best, most favorite and important person. Cheers!!!
I know a parent of a trans male. Our daughters were best buddies from kindergarten to 4th grade but as they got into that preteen time they grew apart. We moved out of MA and I found out that her daughter announced she was trans and during college she had top surgery. I don’t know when hormones were introduced but I know that both parents had to go through counseling to process the loss of their daughter. It was like a death for them. I often wonder when and if their daughter will grow tired of the hormones and what will happen when and if that happens, we’ll see lots of this crazy finger pointing and blaming I’m sure. 🙄🤪
It’s a No True Scotsman fallacy, heterodorx feels he was mistaken, so therefore everyone who has similar feelings must be mistaken. No true Scotsman would have such feelings with any sincerity. Who is he to be speak for everyone? This is all about feelings after all, I feel that I am a kind of woman, heterodorx feels that he was mistaken in his choice, which one is right? Why is it either/or? This is not a rich or interesting way to discuss this issue.
If there is truth about gender indoctrination and the threat it poses to children, this hurts by limiting what help is acceptable. The cynical and limited ways I have read the behavior from this issues loudest critics has convinced me to be skeptical and cynical. There is no room for disagreement here. I have these discussions in my family in case anyone thought I was single.
So many helpful frameworks offered by Corinna. As a disenchanted liberal, I liked his comments about liberals and virtue signaling. No need for him to apologize, as the insights he offers are an important part of understanding the pickle we find ourselves in--and they are not really understood by either liberals or the exasperated conservatives who criticize them. "Liberals tend to be shallow in terms of trying to understand how deep systems of interactions can become...they have a difficult time understanding how larger systems actually interconnect." I have been in this left-side world most of my life (til a few years ago) and used to work for Democrats in my state. I have never heard the liberal approach to policy described as "shallow," but he is right. I think a lot of progressives/liberals latch on to the feel-good talking point at the top. I know that's what I did for years. They're not exactly lazy, but they're too busy living life to look too closely into any system, and the main thing is that they must know they are the "good people" on the "right side of history" AS HAS BEEN EXPLAINED TO THEM by other professional people in the know. If Chris Hayes says such and such is "anti-racist," well OK. If the lobbyist from the ACLU says a new bus policy helps poor folks, that must be good too. Many are too shallow to do their own digging, except for those of us who have actually done our own digging and been shocked at how unwilling our friends are to look more deeply into the complex truths. The basic rules are: follow the talking point, shut out dissent, and automatically support what the activist journalists and professional advocates and lobbyists are pushing as being "good for the poor," or "good for brown people," or of course "good for trans kids." My only caveat with this criticism of liberals is that you could probably say the same thing about most people of any political stripe. The world is far more complex than we can understand. Whatever our politics, humans seem to screw things up royally with unintended consequences flowing from a lack of understanding of complexity.
"... 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.'
That argument and conclusion very much depends on the premises, on the axioms, on the definitions one starts off with. But none of them are cast in concrete; Jehovah didn't blast some of them into the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai as the First Dictionary. But some are better and more useful than others. For instance, the "Sovereign State" of Oklahoma has apparently decided to inscribe some of them into their law books, although they're not much better than folk-biology, to wit:
KJRH: "For example, the Order defines 'female' as a person whose biological reproductive system is designed to produce ova. 'Male' is defined as a person whose biological reproductive system is designed to fertilize the ova of a female."
However, standard biological definitions -- those figuring in reputable journals and dictionaries like the Oxford Dictionary of Biology -- say nothing of the sort. By those definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither therefore being sexless.
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
One CAN follow suit with Oklahoma, but it ain't biology. Not sure of the "wisdom" of going with folk-biology ...
Corrina: "So parents: that's what you have to look forward to.”
Really don't envy those parents when -- or if -- they do some soul-searching into their culpability for what is, without much if any hint of hyperbole, the medical scandal and crime of the century, of the last 100 years.
Corrina's bit about IRC is interesting; the same ecosystem exists today on Reddit, Discord, Twitter/X, and 4chan.
An easy way to protect boys and vulnerable men would be to schedule estrogens -- all of those places provide resources to buy them from overseas pharmacies. Not as easy with testosterone.
Hi please remove my handle as I am not Corinna, I independently came up with this name out of the heteredox space, rebel wisdom kind of thing.
Though I do somewhat align with the views expressed and think you're both doing important work.
Corinna captures the darkness and desolation I see coming toward affirming parents. I know two children irreparably harmed by pediatric gender medicine - a perfectly normal five-year-old boy transed by his mother for liking dolls and pink, and a young girl I watched grow up put on puberty blockers at 12, followed by testosterone and mastectomy. Brains, bodies, lives destroyed for what? The fantasies of men. Devastating.
I respect the hell out of Corinna. I love his podcast Heterodorks, and the compassionate and funny way that he speaks about these issues.
I was watching an ostensibly unrelated YouTube essay the other day about the rise of the term "content" to refer to art (music, videos, movies, etc) streamed online, and it occured to me that the complete dominance not of that term per se but the mindset behind it – that ours is a culture not of art, or beauty, or love, or creativity but of commerce – is a perfect explanation for the spread of gender woo. A movie is no longer art, it's a fungible piece of material fed down the firehouse of business, sold (or not) to meet metrics and numbers and IPOs. And that we all adopted this worldview in unison about four or five years ago times perfectly with the view of the human body as raw material for a business pipeline.
We are not humans, we're content.
"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"
This is such a critical point. Trans isn't about kids. It's not even about sex. (Well for some of our ruling class it might be -- court eunuchs have always been popular.) Trans is a proxy for whether reality exists.
"Reality is a social construct" is a cornerstone of postmodernism. That is why our ruling class will die on the "transwomen are women" hill. Because if "man" and "woman" have objective meanings, other words might too. Words like "parent", "family", "baby", "God", "good", "evil"... and hard definitions for those words will derail the progress that liberalism places as the highest good.
The new culture war makes a whole lot more sense once you realize it's the same old class war wearing a new coat.
Great article. Brave man. Very brave man.
Devastatingly powerful. Thank God for this person's courage and focus.
Small correction: as a Navy vet, I wanted to clarify that Rachel Levine is an admiral in the US Public Health Service, which has uniforms similar to the US Navy and Coast Guard, but which do have differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Public_Health_Service_Commissioned_Corps
“Moving beyond the troubled population” and normalizing queer identities is the point.
This is a classic Leftist political strategy: Exploit the plight of a minority group to advance a broad, unpopular political agenda.
They do this with literally every group/issue. American blacks are poor? Sweeping welfare state. Some women are impregnated by rape? State-funded abortion up until conception. A few children suffer from intense sexual dysphoria? No more limits on what can be done to help children achieve their “queer” identities.
When are we going to recognize this for what it is--emotional manipulation--and stop giving in to it?
Corinna may be right that sooner or later everyone who transitions will have to reckon with this realization... but I think he may be underestimating the extent to which he is just an unusually thoughtful and honest person. I was really impressed by the MichFest story. Some people can tolerate a lot more cognitive dissonance, for a lot longer, than he apparently could. It speaks well of him.
(Not even getting into the AGPs like Levine; I suspect it’s different for someone who transitions for sexual reasons, and some of them seem pretty self-aware.)
This is a phenomenal conversation. Thank you, Heterodork for your sincerity and honesty. I have to say, your comparison with the dentist/filling sitch really struck a nerve with me (see what I did there?) I’ve been attempting for the past several months to help my aging mother find healthcare providers who actually HELP her but am constantly met with “He’s so nice” and “She’s so kind” and the like. It’s maddening! Nice and kind seem to be a proxy for quality in her mind. I can’t seem to convince her that neither of those (very important) attributes constitute good, effective healthcare. Really every service and product provider in her sphere of reality need only meet those minimum standards for her to become a loyal-for-life customer. You verbalized this frustration perfectly. Best to you forever! You’re clearly so intelligent and thoughtful. You deserve peace of mind and true happiness. Someone will be fortunate to call you their best, most favorite and important person. Cheers!!!
I know a parent of a trans male. Our daughters were best buddies from kindergarten to 4th grade but as they got into that preteen time they grew apart. We moved out of MA and I found out that her daughter announced she was trans and during college she had top surgery. I don’t know when hormones were introduced but I know that both parents had to go through counseling to process the loss of their daughter. It was like a death for them. I often wonder when and if their daughter will grow tired of the hormones and what will happen when and if that happens, we’ll see lots of this crazy finger pointing and blaming I’m sure. 🙄🤪
It’s a No True Scotsman fallacy, heterodorx feels he was mistaken, so therefore everyone who has similar feelings must be mistaken. No true Scotsman would have such feelings with any sincerity. Who is he to be speak for everyone? This is all about feelings after all, I feel that I am a kind of woman, heterodorx feels that he was mistaken in his choice, which one is right? Why is it either/or? This is not a rich or interesting way to discuss this issue.
If there is truth about gender indoctrination and the threat it poses to children, this hurts by limiting what help is acceptable. The cynical and limited ways I have read the behavior from this issues loudest critics has convinced me to be skeptical and cynical. There is no room for disagreement here. I have these discussions in my family in case anyone thought I was single.
So many helpful frameworks offered by Corinna. As a disenchanted liberal, I liked his comments about liberals and virtue signaling. No need for him to apologize, as the insights he offers are an important part of understanding the pickle we find ourselves in--and they are not really understood by either liberals or the exasperated conservatives who criticize them. "Liberals tend to be shallow in terms of trying to understand how deep systems of interactions can become...they have a difficult time understanding how larger systems actually interconnect." I have been in this left-side world most of my life (til a few years ago) and used to work for Democrats in my state. I have never heard the liberal approach to policy described as "shallow," but he is right. I think a lot of progressives/liberals latch on to the feel-good talking point at the top. I know that's what I did for years. They're not exactly lazy, but they're too busy living life to look too closely into any system, and the main thing is that they must know they are the "good people" on the "right side of history" AS HAS BEEN EXPLAINED TO THEM by other professional people in the know. If Chris Hayes says such and such is "anti-racist," well OK. If the lobbyist from the ACLU says a new bus policy helps poor folks, that must be good too. Many are too shallow to do their own digging, except for those of us who have actually done our own digging and been shocked at how unwilling our friends are to look more deeply into the complex truths. The basic rules are: follow the talking point, shut out dissent, and automatically support what the activist journalists and professional advocates and lobbyists are pushing as being "good for the poor," or "good for brown people," or of course "good for trans kids." My only caveat with this criticism of liberals is that you could probably say the same thing about most people of any political stripe. The world is far more complex than we can understand. Whatever our politics, humans seem to screw things up royally with unintended consequences flowing from a lack of understanding of complexity.
"... 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.'
That argument and conclusion very much depends on the premises, on the axioms, on the definitions one starts off with. But none of them are cast in concrete; Jehovah didn't blast some of them into the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai as the First Dictionary. But some are better and more useful than others. For instance, the "Sovereign State" of Oklahoma has apparently decided to inscribe some of them into their law books, although they're not much better than folk-biology, to wit:
KJRH: "For example, the Order defines 'female' as a person whose biological reproductive system is designed to produce ova. 'Male' is defined as a person whose biological reproductive system is designed to fertilize the ova of a female."
https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/gov-stitt-signs-womens-bill-of-rights-through-executive-order
However, standard biological definitions -- those figuring in reputable journals and dictionaries like the Oxford Dictionary of Biology -- say nothing of the sort. By those definitions, to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither therefore being sexless.
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990 (see the Glossary)
https://twitter.com/pwkilleen/status/1039879009407037441 (Oxford Dictionary of Biology)
One CAN follow suit with Oklahoma, but it ain't biology. Not sure of the "wisdom" of going with folk-biology ...
Corrina: "So parents: that's what you have to look forward to.”
Really don't envy those parents when -- or if -- they do some soul-searching into their culpability for what is, without much if any hint of hyperbole, the medical scandal and crime of the century, of the last 100 years.
Corrina's bit about IRC is interesting; the same ecosystem exists today on Reddit, Discord, Twitter/X, and 4chan.
An easy way to protect boys and vulnerable men would be to schedule estrogens -- all of those places provide resources to buy them from overseas pharmacies. Not as easy with testosterone.
Wow. May I just say this was a frikkin fantastic interview! Thanks Wesley, thanks Corinna. ❤️