Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast at the intersection of psychology and culture that intimately explores the human experience and critiques the counseling profession. Your host, Stephanie Winn, distills wisdom gained from her practice as a family therapist and coach while pivoting towards questions of how to apply a practical understanding of psychology to the novel dilemmas of the 21st century, from political polarization to medical malpractice.
What does ethical mental health care look like in a normless age, as our moral compasses spin in search of true north? How can therapists treat patients under pressure to affirm everything from the notion of "gender identity" to assisted suicide?
Primarily a long-form interview podcast, Stephanie invites unorthodox, free-thinking guests from many walks of life, including counselors, social workers, medical professionals, writers, researchers, and people with unique lived experience, such as detransitioners.
Curious about many things, Stephanie’s interdisciplinary psychological lens investigates challenging social issues and inspires transformation in the self, relationships, and society. She is known for bringing calm warmth to painful subjects, and astute perceptiveness to ethically complex issues. Pick up a torch to illuminate the dark night and join us on this journey through the inner wilderness.
You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist ranks in the top 1% globally according to ListenNotes. New episodes are released every Monday. Three and a half years after the show's inception in May of 2022, Stephanie became a Christian, representing the crystallization of moral, spiritual, and existential views she had been openly grappling with along with her audience and guests. Newer episodes (#188 forward) may sometimes reflect a Christian understanding, interwoven with and applied to the same issues the podcast has always addressed. The podcast remains diverse and continues to feature guests from all viewpoints.
223. Roisin Michaux
===
[00:00:00] Roisin: So I lied to him. I have to admit I lied. But this is what you have to do when nobody will answer your emails. Like there's no point asking the WHO or the UN or anyone any questions about this. I have to do these spy tactics. What this man told me is the plan and these guidelines. The plan and these [00:00:15] guidelines is basically to mainstream trans healthcare in the public health system, which in Europe would look like you go to your ordinary doctor and you say, "Hi, I'm trans.
[00:00:25] Roisin: Can I have testosterone?" And your doctor says, "Yeah, sure. Here you go. Here's a prescription." [00:00:30]
[00:00:30] Announcer: You must be some kind of therapist.
[00:00:35] Stephanie: Today I'm welcoming back to the podcast Róisín Michaux. She is an Irish writer based in Brussels, Belgium. She writes about women's rights and free [00:00:45] speech in the context of the transgender movement. She first appeared on this podcast on episode 206, The Intersex Lie: Róisín Michaux On How Queer Theory Hijacked a Rare Medical Condition.
[00:00:58] Stephanie: Today I'm excited to [00:01:00] have Róisín back to talk about her latest investigations into the new WHO guidelines regarding global transgender healthcare. Róisín, welcome back. So good to see you again.
[00:01:13] Roisin: Hi, Stephanie. Lovely to see you again [00:01:15] too.
[00:01:15] Stephanie: So I always love having people back on the show who I've spoken with before, because I know that the conversation will flow, and that you're gonna catch us up to speed on what you've been up to since, uh, you last spoke here.
[00:01:27] Stephanie: A lot of people really appreciated your conversation on [00:01:30] this podcast before, found it very enlightening. I know a lot of people are very appreciative of, of sort of the depth of your independent investigative journalism. And so when we booked this interview, I had no idea what we were gonna talk about. I just knew that I trusted you to bring something good.
[00:01:44] Stephanie: And so [00:01:45] I'm just finding out, um, what you're learning about these WHO guidelines. And so I want the listeners to bear that in mind as they listen to our conversation, that I'm hearing this for the first time. And so I will probably be asking some of [00:02:00] the same dumb, naive questions that are occurring to listeners as they're hearing this for the first time as well.
[00:02:05] Roisin: Cool. So yeah, when you contacted me, I, I understood the spirit of your message, which is we had a lot of fun talking the last time, and I was like, "Yeah, it's su- it really, really was." And you were like, "Talk [00:02:15] about what you've been doing recently," and I've been doing so many things. And actually What day was it that we spoke the last time?
[00:02:21] Roisin: Was it m- sometime in March- Mm ... April? A few months ago. I think
[00:02:24] Stephanie: January.
[00:02:25] Roisin: Yeah.
[00:02:25] Stephanie: I don't know.
[00:02:26] Roisin: I think ... No, I think it w- it w- it was a bit later than that because I think [00:02:30] I had already been fired for, uh, t- being a TERF in my workplace, and I didn't, I didn't wanna talk about it yet, so I spoke to you. I was devastated.
[00:02:36] Roisin: I remember I was devastated but I had been fired because, um, yeah, I was organizing inside my job and, and I, I had just recently been fired. So that's one thing [00:02:45] that I was up to, but I'm gonna be speaking to ... Oh, I spoke about it on WDI last week. Um, and yeah, so ever since then I've been doing a lot of work.
[00:02:54] Roisin: I have been working on a lot of different issues always related to the [00:03:00] transgender, uh, topic generally. And one of the things that I think when you contacted me that I was working on quite a lot was this WHO guideline. So I'll give a little bit of a background of what that is and why it's important. Um, in [00:03:15] 2022, um, there was a decision made or a decision announced by the WHO that they would work on guidelines to guide national governments, national governments' public health systems on how to treat [00:03:30] transgender and gender-diverse people, adults and kids.
[00:03:33] Roisin: Um, and this, uh, the ... What didn't come out of the blue, the, the decision to make these guidelines, it's called a gu- a guideline ... Yeah, sorry, it's called a guideline, and then they would put together a guideline development group who [00:03:45] would draft these guidelines, and it didn't come out of the blue. It came because the ICD had been rewritten.
[00:03:51] Roisin: I don't know if you know what the ICD is. It's the y- it's the International Classification of Diseases. So you have the DSM for [00:04:00] mental health, I think, in the US. The DSM, that's just, uh, ps- psychiatry or whatever. Um, uh, the ICD is sort of like a DSM but for everything, and it's global. And so it's used by national governments, um, to [00:04:15] dictate, uh, insurance.
[00:04:17] Roisin: It, and it, it, it will produce the codes for insurance that will be used to apply for certain conditions then, then t- for reimbursement reasons. So the ICD isn't gonna dictate how much people are reimbursed for what. So the ICD, the [00:04:30] idea is to give national governments the official diagnoses of various diseases and conditions, and th- each of those diagnoses will have a code, and then the government will use those codes in the public health system to determine reimbursements and stuff.
[00:04:43] Roisin: So this is ... The ICD is [00:04:45] basically the, the almanac of all of the, the officially diagnosed trademark, uh, diseases and conditions and syndromes and stuff so that, yeah, people can organize their public health systems around them. The reason they decided to create new guidelines [00:05:00] is because the ICD had been updated in 2019 and it had switched gender identity disorders and whatever they were called in the ICD-10 into, from the category of mental health disorders, and they flipped them into the category [00:05:15] on s- under sexual health.
[00:05:17] Roisin: And the reason why that was done, and you probably know this yourself, is because they wanted to depathologize it. So the, the mission to depathologize trans has been an ongoing mission for a long time, uh, since at least 2007 that I can [00:05:30] officially find records of. Um, but it was finally depathologized, but that creates this conundrum for the transgender community, which is that how can you get health treatment, hormones, surgeries, et cetera, [00:05:45] reimbursed in the health system if you don't have a health condition?
[00:05:49] Roisin: So rather than just remove it, uh, root and branch from the ICD, they just placed it in a different category so that it would still be able to be classified as a diagnosis of [00:06:00] sorts and treated. So that was the strategy. So because it had moved into this new section and it was now a new thing, um, there needed to be guidelines to, to instruct healthcare systems on how to manage this [00:06:15] new dise- this diagnosis that's suddenly now reclassified as a, as a issue pertaining to sexual health.
[00:06:22] Roisin: So the WHO announced that we're setting up a guideline development group and they're gonna work on this. They put together a group, and if I remember correctly, [00:06:30] there was maybe, let's say, about 16 to 20 people on it, and it created a fair- fairly big uproar back in 2023 when it was announced, this list of people.
[00:06:40] Roisin: So when you looked at the list of people, it was clearly full of activists. [00:06:45] There were lots of people who were activists. There were lots of WPATH people on it. Um, there were people from activist organizations like ILGA, which is basically, um, it's like our Trevor Project in Europe. So all these sort of NGOs or what you would call nonprofits, [00:07:00] um, they were all in this group.
[00:07:03] Roisin: And one of, one of my theories about the origins of this entire, um, mania, as I call it, trans mania, is, um, it's, it's strongly linked to HIV. So I was not [00:07:15] surprised to see that in this group, not only was it WPATH people and activists, about half of them were working HIV. And what was interesting was when there was a m- when the, the announcement was made in 2023 [00:07:30] that there was gonna be a new guideline and a new guideline development group in order to help people make sense of the new ICD-11 with this new categorization, they said, "This is a public consultation.
[00:07:42] Roisin: If you have any feedback on the plan or on the [00:07:45] people that we've chosen for this guideline development group, you can send us an email," and the email was hiv@who.org or .net or whatever it is. So I was fascinated by that. Well, I was really happy with that because I've been saying for a long time that there's this link [00:08:00] between the two, and I can get into it in a minute.
[00:08:02] Roisin: But so, uh, lots of organizations in the UK like Sex Matters, LGB International, all of those, they wrote to this email address and they said, "This can't be. You can't have all these activists on." So they made some changes, and one [00:08:15] of the changes they made was they removed a guy called Florence Ashley, who's a Canadian autogynephile, and he's written really weird, uh...
[00:08:24] Roisin: He, he's a, he's a jurist, uh, in French canon- French Canadian, which means I guess he's just a lawyer or a [00:08:30] legal expert or something. He'd written legal type papers about, you know, transition of kids, and it was really quite dodgy. So they were like, "Okay, okay." They took him off out of the group and they added some more clinicians, so people with experience.
[00:08:43] Roisin: So I [00:08:45] realized, uh... So, so then the, the, the hubbub died down. Everyone was sort of reassured, "Okay, we've got more experts in this group," and then everyone stopped talking about it. And, um, they carried on with their work, but I think a lot of people... I got the [00:09:00] impression that a lot of people thought that that, that entire project had been dropped.
[00:09:04] Roisin: But actually, the WHO had just switched up who was gonna make up this guideline development group, and they also decided that they weren't going to focus on children at all because the evidence base just [00:09:15] wasn't there, and that the guidelines that would ultimately be created would only be for adults.
[00:09:18] Roisin: But I just remembered it there recently, and I was like, "Whatever happened to that group? Did that get abandoned?" And I asked some other TERFs, and they said, "Oh, no, that idea is gone. No, no, no. We, we fought that and we won." And I, and I looked it up and I said, [00:09:30] "No, actually, it's still ongoing, and actually it's due to be released any day now.
[00:09:33] Roisin: So, so what is the plan in, in this group, and what are we gonna get?" And the reason why I care so much about this is because the propaganda coup that it's gonna represent for [00:09:45] activists to be able to say... Can you imagine the press releases? World Health Organization says this X, Y, Z. We all must do this with trans healthcare.
[00:09:54] Roisin: So the dangers are huge. The dangers are huge in the sense that what are they gonna tell [00:10:00] national health systems to do and how to treat this, you know, what kind of damages are gonna do, but also how much ammunition is it gonna be for, um, the NGO sector, the activist side. So I was quite worried [00:10:15] about it, so I, I did quite a bit of research, and I came across a person who had given some quotes to a online, an online medical magazine called Medscape, and she's a non-binary identified woman.
[00:10:29] Roisin: And she [00:10:30] said, "Yeah, it's very difficult. The discussion has been very, very difficult. There's been a lot of, um, conflict," is essentially what she said. I'm paraphrasing, but she said there's been a lot of conflict inside the group about these guidelines. Um, so we... The... A- and the journalist was [00:10:45] saying, "We're, we're expecting these guidelines.
[00:10:46] Roisin: Where are they?" And she was saying, "Well, we're still working on it, but should be out anytime soon." And she gave the indication that it would be sometime around the middle of this year. So I was like, okay, we- any minute now, there's gonna... Uh, so I started writing to organizations that I know saying, "Be, be [00:11:00] ready for this.
[00:11:00] Roisin: It's gonna come out. We need to be ready to say, ready with all the arguments," because we know that if the WHO is making these guidelines and half the people on it are activists, I think we, we know which direction it's going, you know? I spoke with somebody, a health journalist, [00:11:15] who saw me tweeting about this.
[00:11:16] Roisin: I was tweeting saying, "Everybody, can you please pa- refocus your attention on this WHO thing that's about to come out." And so a d- a health journalist contacted me and said, "You seem to know something about this. Have you got some inf- inside [00:11:30] information?" And I said, "No, not at all. I'm just telling people, like, you know, fi- see if you can get any, get one, get someone to tell you what's happening within this group, because I think it's gonna be quite monumentous when this comes out, and we're gonna have to deal with it, you know?"[00:11:45]
[00:11:45] Roisin: Um, so I thought, "How can I figure out what's going on?" So I just looked up, uh, all the members of the group, and I found the name of an Indian man. And I've spent a lot of time in India, and I have, I have really good relationships with Indian people. And I [00:12:00] just saw this Indian guy's name. I said, "I'm just gonna write to him and say, uh, 'Hi, I'm really interested in...'"
[00:12:06] Roisin: So I lied to him. I have to admit, I lied. But this is what you have to do, or nobody will, nobody will answer your emails. Like, there's no point asking the WHO or the UN or [00:12:15] anyone any questions about this. I, I have to do these, uh, sort of, um, spy tactics. So I, I, I wrote to him and I said, "I'm setting up a sexual health clinic, and I'm waiting [00:12:30] for these WHO guidelines, and I'm interested in the Indian experience."
[00:12:34] Roisin: So a little bit of background. Um, India is home to one of these so-called third genders, which is, uh, a, a cultural phenomenon that doesn't exist outside of [00:12:45] India. It exists in different forms, very similar forms, in various places all around the world. So in Indonesia, you've got it. They're called waria. In Hawaii, you've got it.
[00:12:55] Roisin: They're called māhū. In Mexico, they're called muxe. [00:13:00] Um, what it i- what I've always suspected that it is, is a gay man, so what we would in the West culturally call a gay man, not accepted because he's not manly enough. He's not masculine. He's too feminine, [00:13:15] unacceptable. Um, and this Even without know- knowing they were all doing it independently, so many cultures independently found a solution for these effeminate gay men, which was to [00:13:30] allow them to occupy a third role.
[00:13:32] Roisin: And interestingly, these third role, third, uh, third gender roles don't ... They, they, these men themselves say, "I'm not a man, I'm not a woman, I'm a muxe." They say, "I'm not a man, I'm not a woman, I'm a [00:13:45] ladyboy, I'm a kathoey. I'm not a man, I'm not a woman, I'm a mahu. I'm not a man, I'm not a woman, I'm a muxe." So it really is this third gender identity that they were allowed to occupy.
[00:13:56] Roisin: Um, and this is taken as a kind of [00:14:00] very nice de- uh, you're supposed to decolonize your thinking and s- and stop seeing this as like, oh, this is a workaround for too feminine men in poor parts of the world where homophobia is just, like, intrinsic in the culture. You're supposed [00:14:15] to see this as, like, a fun and happy and diverse, exotic form of gender diversity, you know?
[00:14:20] Roisin: So this is how you're supposed to look at it, but when you look at the facts on the ground, these are gay boys who they are bullied at school as soon as they start to ... And I know it's, it's, it's crude to, [00:14:30] to put it like this, but once they start acting gay or looking gay or it becomes clear that, you know, we all know what I'm talking about when I say you see a little boy and you're like, "Okay, this boy is gonna probably grow up to be androphilic," like, attracted to men.
[00:14:44] Roisin: Um, [00:14:45] these boys, I, they, I suspect they are very much the target of sexual abuse because they are the way they are. Why they end up, why so many trans women end up in prostitution, I think this is one of the reasons why. I think when they're young, they can make a lot of money. They drop [00:15:00] out of school. So it's a big, big, big issue, and they are by far the most susceptible to HIV infection of any org- any group.
[00:15:09] Roisin: So just bear that in mind when I say that I contacted this Indian guy. I said, "I'm, I'm setting up this sexual health [00:15:15] clinic. I would like to s- understand the Indian situation." The Indian situation is that they have mainstreamed Hormones for trans women in with HIV [00:15:30] clinics. So they combine the two things because the only w- the way that they can get these men to take their PrEP or to come and get tested or to take antiretrovirals is to offer something that they actually do want, and what they do want is the [00:15:45] surgeries and the, the hormones and stuff.
[00:15:47] Roisin: So this is the background in India. They've done that in Thailand. They've done it in India. Um, those were the two pilot countries as far as I know because they've got big populations of these third gender. It turns out the Indian guy on the WHO's guideline development [00:16:00] group, um, his son is a, is a hijra.
[00:16:05] Roisin: So his... So he's a Brahmin. He was, the first thing he told me on the call was that he's a Brahmin, which means he's the upper top caste, so he's a very fancy guy. [00:16:15] And what he's trying to do, we spoke for a couple of hours. Um, he was, he spoke with me very, very openly about his situation and why he was getting involved in this.
[00:16:24] Roisin: So he set up basically the WPATH of India. He said it's called PATHI. Um, we have one in [00:16:30] Ireland as well. Uh, there's various regional WPATHs. He set up the Indian one, and mostly it's for parents of kids who, um, are trans, and this is a support group. And so he's the regional, he's the India regional [00:16:45] guy. Um, and so he told me about his story, you know, his son, and the story with his son is that his son was an effeminate gay boy.
[00:16:54] Roisin: And, you know, in India, you kick those boys out of your house or [00:17:00] you m- push them, re- shove them into the closet and you make them stay there or, you know, it's, it's awful. And but to be a hijra is also awful because I don't know if you've ever been to India, but they're real, like, the situation is [00:17:15] very, very extreme.
[00:17:17] Roisin: If you're a hijra, you go live in a colony of hijras, and you do sex work. You do prostitution. And they have this guru-chela system. A guru is the, the head of the, is the guru, and then the [00:17:30] chela is, uh, they have, like, these deputy types. Basically, it's a pimp colony. It's a prostitution colony with a pimp at the head of it.
[00:17:38] Roisin: Um, and this exists all over India and has for thousands of years, and this is what happens to feminine gay boys in India. This [00:17:45] is the workaround that they found. So this very high-class elite doctor w- so in some ways I feel really s- a lot of sympathy for him. He's trying to mainstream and normalize [00:18:00] being transgender, so get away from the terminology of hijra and move towards the Western concept of transge- of, of trans in order to save boys like his son, you know?
[00:18:12] Roisin: So- This [00:18:15] is basically the story that he told me, and it's confirmed what I've always thought, which was that, you know, hijras are, are these... There, there's not much you can do with an effeminate boy in India unless you are high [00:18:30] status, have money, international connections. You might get to do something. So this guy is basically doing that.
[00:18:36] Roisin: So he's on this guideline development group. Um, feel free to jump in and ask me any questions, or I don't know if it's, uh-
[00:18:43] Stephanie: You said to [00:18:45] save these hijras, to save the gay boys, and you describe a pretty terrible life for them otherwise, joining a, a colony where they're pimped out, they're prostituted, and probably [00:19:00] lifespan's very short.
[00:19:01] Stephanie: Yeah. Um, they're only valuable when they're young, and then like- Yeah ... you say, they're at high risk of HIV, and they, they die of HIV, AIDS, or they die of addiction, or they die from abuse. You know, it's not a good [00:19:15] life. When you talk about saving them from that path by transing them, what does their life look like when they trans?
[00:19:23] Stephanie: Do some of them actually stay in prostitution like they do in the United States? Or do they live- I don't think
[00:19:28] Roisin: it's happened yet [00:19:30]
[00:19:30] Stephanie: I mean- I think this is the- Does... Is the idea that these young men, instead of entering a life of prostitution, they can live in the same role that women occupy in that society?
[00:19:41] Stephanie: Which honestly, the role that women occupy in India doesn't sound [00:19:45] too great either based on my conversation with Vaishnavi Sundar.
[00:19:48] Roisin: So the, the goal is to lift these men out of their miserable situation, and you could do that by just saying, "Oh, it's okay to be gay," and then just accepting that these men are gay.
[00:19:59] Roisin: [00:20:00] That's never gonna happen in that culture. So the alternative is to not say hijra is good and it's fine. It's to get rid of these label, labels, the bad labels, and then move towards this Western sanitized, [00:20:15] homogenized idea of the trans woman, and we can jump on that. There's a very revealing document that I came across, and it's from 2013, and it was the Open Society Foundations.
[00:20:25] Roisin: So the Open Society Foundations is the George Soros foundation that paid for so [00:20:30] much of this stuff, at least in Europe, also in the States, but a lot of it in Europe. And in that m- it was a, it was a meeting in an office in New York in 2013, and this, the, the executive director of that organization was there, and it was a whole people sitting around having a, a [00:20:45] working lunch talking about their experiences on tr- on basically the, developing the trans program.
[00:20:52] Roisin: And one of the comments that was made was, um, there are people in the Philippines, and in the Philippines their [00:21:00] name is, oh, I can't remember I wish I could remember 'cause it's important to this, the quote that he said. We're trying to, um, awaken their consciousness that they are not name of third [00:21:15] gender, they are trans women.
[00:21:16] Roisin: So it seems like the global program was to, they have this false consciousness that they are this, let's say hijra. They have this false consciousness that they are mahu. They have this false consciousness that they are [00:21:30] th- this thing. Actually what they are is trans. So there was this sort of global idea to turn all of these, these pe- to, to not to turn them, but to m- get them to start identifying as trans.
[00:21:42] Stephanie: Uh, I just wanna notice [00:21:45] how, how That feels diametrically opposed to the woke approach to culture. Like, like it, the- Because
[00:21:59] Roisin: I [00:22:00] think it's a public health thing.
[00:22:02] Stephanie: Well, okay, so, so l- I mean, let me just, like, put on my woke thinking hat for a moment, right? According to that worldview, colonialism is the problem, and you're supposed to decolonize [00:22:15] your mind and have respect for other cultures.
[00:22:17] Stephanie: And so ostensibly, the hijra, the mahu, all, all these different groups need to be respected as parts of cultures rather than [00:22:30] influenced by Western colonialism, right? So, uh- Right ... I'm just noticing the vast discrepancy there be- and because- Absolutely ... when it's politically convenient for trans rights activists to say, "Oh, look at all these different cultures that have [00:22:45] third genders.
[00:22:45] Stephanie: There's the mahu, there's the hijra, there's all these different groups." When it's politically convenient for them to say that, they absolutely will. But you're saying at the same time, there's a push to take those so-called third gender roles in these other [00:23:00] cultures and colonize them with the Western notion that you're actually this thing called trans, and you need cross-sex hormones and surgeries.
[00:23:10] Roisin: I don't think that OSF, Open Society Foundations, would ever publish anything like that [00:23:15] again on their website, especially, like, that was 2013. It was kind of a different universe back then. We hadn't really gone so mental on the decolonial stuff. That's for one point. The other point is that absolutely this is a colonial project if there ever, ever there was one.
[00:23:27] Roisin: I, I saw an article last week about African women saying, [00:23:30] "Stop with your pronouns, please. You know, uh, we can't, we just, we're not doing it." Um, what happened in 2010 is also very important. There was a meeting in 2010, and this links to the depathologization campaign [00:23:45] that eventually ended up in the ICD being changed and eventually ended up in this WHO group that began, we're talking about.
[00:23:51] Roisin: There was a meeting in 2010, and it was in Barcelona, and it was funded by the French and Spanish and Dutch and British governments, and it brought [00:24:00] together all the trans people, uh, that it could find from around the world, and it was part of the It was, there was like a two or three-day conference, and it, there was a stop, uh, a stop pathologizing trans march, and there was a this and that, [00:24:15] various trans activities, mostly organized by French and Spanish prostitutes, male transsexual prostitutes from Latin America who were, uh, protesting against the fact that they have to go through psychiatric, um...
[00:24:27] Roisin: Sorry, I'm giving too many details there. A lot of these men, they had [00:24:30] to go through psychiatric, uh, gatekeeping before they could get their hormones and stuff, and this was a big problem for them. The governments were willing to help them because they, a lot of them have HIV. So that's why the French government, the development budget of the [00:24:45] Norwegian government is going towards this mega conference in Barcelona to gather, gather all these third genders from all around the room.
[00:24:54] Roisin: And you can see the minutes. Or people have written, a couple of people have written theses or research papers that mention [00:25:00] this meeting, and that's how we know that it happened because it's no- it wasn't advertised by any of the governments of the countries that funded it. In the meeting... Have I lost you?
[00:25:08] Stephanie: I know you're explaining the HIV connection, but I, you know, not that this is [00:25:15] child-appropriate content, but I almost wanna say explain it to me like I'm five. Like- Okay ... like when you say that the government was willing to help them because they have HIV, like how does that compute?
[00:25:26] Roisin: Right. Okay. Well, let's go back then to 2005.
[00:25:29] Roisin: [00:25:30] Um, when you go, if you go to Paris and you go to a place called Bois de Boulogne, it's full of transsexual Peruvian male prostitutes. Um, Paris is full of Latin American prostitutes, and they are... This is their [00:25:45] situation. They fly in on a tourist visa, then they stay, overstay their visa, and they disappear off the health radar.
[00:25:52] Roisin: Then they work in the Bois de Boulogne. They have sex in s- they are the penetrated partner, [00:26:00] which is high, increases your risk for HIV. The men who have sex with them, and this is the part that I always get angry emails about, are not gay. They are chasers. So they're often have wives at home and children at home.
[00:26:13] Roisin: They are [00:26:15] fet- they fetishize chicks with dicks. So if y- it's funny because there's so many she-males, there's so many of these chicks with dicks everywhere, but nobody ever admits to being the guy who has sex with them. But it's not gay men having sex with these men. The men who are having sex with these men are straight [00:26:30] men.
[00:26:31] Roisin: This i- this is a hugely high-risk population for HIV. The estimate is in Latin American countries, like half, half of m- half of trans women have HIV in a lot of La- Latin American [00:26:45] countries. Like, we're not talking about 1%, 3%, 10%. We're talking about half, you know?
[00:26:50] Stephanie: We might have to keep going on one tangent after another because I'm realizing we probably also need to get you to explain gynandromorphophilia.
[00:26:59] Roisin: Okay.
[00:26:59] Stephanie: [00:27:00] And, uh, 'cause, like, I'm following, but I also have my head in this world- Yeah ... all day long, and a lot of people are just hearing about this the first time. And you're saying men who have sex with men aren't gay, and people are going- Yeah ... "What do you mean? Of course they're [00:27:15] gay." So y- I, I have seen you post about GAMPs, gynandromorphophiles, and how, and the psychology of how that works, the connection with pornography.
[00:27:25] Stephanie: I don't know if you wanna explain all that right now or if we just wanna put a pin in it for later. [00:27:30]
[00:27:30] Roisin: I mean, I don't think there's much to say about it except that some men, um, are, have a fetish for what I'm just gonna call for shorthand she-males. Okay. So if you go on Pornhub, you can see it's a very popular category.[00:27:45]
[00:27:45] Roisin: If, uh, if you go to a red-light district, usually in cities there's a part where the she-males are, and so you can go find one there. And there's always a steady supply of these shemales. So you can never g- I, I said this in an article recently, you can never [00:28:00] get any information on the demand side, so you have to go to the supply side.
[00:28:03] Roisin: So I've gone to the supply side and I've said, "Who are your c- customers?" You know, they're not, they're not gay men, they're married straight men. Um, when I say straight, they have this particular fetish. [00:28:15] So gyn Andromorphophilia is the attraction to shemales, and in the lingo on Reddit, you'll hear these men called chasers.
[00:28:23] Roisin: Chasers and shemales. So it's such an a, an a, a shameful thing apparently that you'll never [00:28:30] find a man who admits to being into this. Um, making things slightly more complicated, if you're one of these men, a GAMP, gyn Andromorphophilia, which means you're attracted to shemales, there's a very high chance that you're also an autogynephile, which means a man who also [00:28:45] likes to dress up as a female.
[00:28:46] Roisin: So it's a very particular type of, uh, sexual orientation/fetish. What these men are attracted to, and not all of them are AGP. Stop me if you're not following me, but what these men are attracted to is hyper femininity, [00:29:00] and there is nothing more hyper feminine than a shemale prostitute. So what they really like is the big boobs, the, the big lips, the, the hair, the stuff that, the overly feminine gestures and stuff.
[00:29:12] Roisin: That's what they're looking for. The [00:29:15] ones who are... Then there are the ones who require the dick. The penis is an essential part of the, of the thrill. And you'll notice that if you look at HIV research, they don't talk about gay men and straight men, they talk about men who have sex with men [00:29:30] because lots of men have sex with other men even though they're not attracted to men.
[00:29:33] Roisin: They have sex with men in prison or in circumstances, or a lot of young men would do that. But there's also a category called men who have sex with transgender women, and this is a, this is the chasers, and they're a [00:29:45] very important, uh, c- um, cohorts in HIV research because it's not b- because epidemiology deals with networks.
[00:29:53] Roisin: So the network, the gay, the gay men network is one network, but the network of straight guys, of, of [00:30:00] GAMPs having sex with shemales is a completely different network. And the big risk, and this used to be spoken about but it's stigmatizing so we're not really supposed to talk about it, they are a bridge population because they can spread HIV to the general population, [00:30:15] um, and via their wives and stuff, and via their female sexual partners, via female prostitutes that they have sex with.
[00:30:20] Roisin: So when people talk about the most marginalized community, you know you see this all the time in trans activist communications, the most [00:30:30] marginalized people in society. That originally was used to describe this very, very marginalized group of soci- in society. So I'll give you the typical trajectory of a Brazilian, a feminine Brazilian boy, um, over the [00:30:45] last 20, 30, 40, 50 years.
[00:30:47] Roisin: A young Brazilian boy, he start, he starts to show feminine traits in school. It becomes a problem. He starts getting bullied Um, it makes it very difficult for him to go to school. People are calling him a girl, girly, all this stuff. It's a very macho [00:31:00] society. He starts to get hit on. So this is a thing that we don't talk about enough.
[00:31:06] Roisin: Young gay men get attracted to sexual abuse from men, whether gay or straight. It happens both. This is a [00:31:15] very common occurrence. They can make a lot of money in prostitution, so they kind of get enticed into it. The money is really good when you're young, which is disgusting, but it's the truth. Um, in order to make the money, they s- quickly realize that [00:31:30] you can take hormones, you can buy the pill, you can get injections of estrogen, and you, then you start to grow breasts.
[00:31:35] Roisin: But as soon as you start to get, to grow breasts, you get bullied more at school, so you quit school. So you drop out of school, essentially. Um, so you've got these teenage male prostitutes living on the streets [00:31:45] and getting, and taking drugs, um, completely off the health radar because they'll go into the hospital and it's like, you know, what have you
[00:31:53] Roisin: Well, you know, the state that you're in, you know, you've live rough, like your family have kicked you out of the village. You know, it's ... [00:32:00] They're really the most marginalized people in all of society. So every time I see that phrase, I think of those boys, 'cause that's a reality, and it's the same reality all over the world except where we live in the West, where we're very lucky, except perhaps, uh, Black Americans in, uh, in, in the US.
[00:32:14] Roisin: [00:32:15] I think that's why Black trans women and all this Black trans women stuff is all about those boys, because ... And that's a huge part of HIV campaigning is Black trans women, because this is who we're talking about, Black boys from conservative families who are too gay, who end up getting sort [00:32:30] of roped into this as well.
[00:32:31] Roisin: Marsha P. Johnson was a typical example. He was a gay guy who made money and sometimes dressed up as a woman because he was probably prostituting himself, and doing the she-male thing would make him more money. Um, and a note on that [00:32:45] as well, like, a l- some of these gay boys do have dysphoria. It's not that common, but it's, it happens, 'cause I've read a lot of research papers on this, that sometimes they'll have dysphoria, but they don't get rid of, they don't ever get rid of their penises, and the reason is [00:33:00] because that's the huge part of their appeal to their clients, to their boyfriends.
[00:33:04] Roisin: And when you see a story about a trans woman has been murdered, it gets blamed on TERFs, it gets blamed on people like us who are talking about gender-affirming care for kids and stuff. It's always their partners or their clients. It's always the [00:33:15] punter or their boyfriend. The on and off, off, o- on again, off again boyfriends and punters who are sometimes the same person.
[00:33:22] Roisin: That's who murders them because they are generally crazy people, by the sounds of it So those are [00:33:30] the... This population of boys and men is extremely vulnerable. In Paris and in Spain more than any other country, maybe Italy, back in the early 2000s, these men were starting to organize because they [00:33:45] wanted, they wanted certain things.
[00:33:46] Roisin: Their situation was bad. They, they had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get a, um, a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in order to get their estrogen, in order to get surgery if they wanted it, electrolysis or breast implants or [00:34:00] whatever. And they also said that they r- they... Part of that was saying, "We want legal gender recognition, and we want it to be easier than it currently is," and et cetera, et cetera.
[00:34:09] Roisin: So they pros- protested against that for... It started in earnest in about 2005, [00:34:15] and it was completely intertwined with HIV, um, activism HIV public health issues. The French had just discovered that, um, HIV among trans women was sky high, and that had come from, [00:34:30] um, studies that had been done on American trans women, uh, finding that, like, this population, oh my God, if we wanna get a grip on HIV, we need to start separating this group out and start doing something about it.
[00:34:41] Roisin: So suddenly you had two causes. You had the, a public [00:34:45] health issue, and then you had trans rights, and they sort- they got married in those years, starting from around 2005, in France and Spain especially. So there was a group in Paris that used to go out on the streets and protest for depathologization, better access to [00:35:00] HIV, this, this, this, this.
[00:35:01] Roisin: They made all these, these, these, uh, claims or, um, demands. It- and then Barcelona started to realize they, they also had loads of similar men in same situations. Again, a lot of these [00:35:15] men are off-grid, so they can't really-- They're not on any h- they're not in the health system, you know? A lot of them are there illegally, all this stuff.
[00:35:21] Roisin: Like, they're really down, down and out. Like, it's, it's really serious when they say it's a vulnerable group. So they sorta got together, start organizing, and what they did was they said, [00:35:30] "Let's have a trans depathologization campaign." The Spanish government relented and introduced a not, a softer, easier, better gender recognition and medical pathway, but it wasn't enough.
[00:35:43] Roisin: It didn't go far enough because it still re- [00:35:45] had some gatekeeping, but also it didn't include trans women who weren't legally on the Spanish territory, and it was like, basically, they're all illegal, so it's not gonna fix the problem. So they kept protesting, kept protesting. Meanwhile, as I said, we've established that HIV is a huge problem in this [00:36:00] population.
[00:36:00] Roisin: We don't t- we don't say it in the press. We don't put a, don't put out press releases from the WHO saying, "Oh, we figured out who's, like, this huge teeming network of infection." You don't do that because the stigmatization was established. The [00:36:15] stigmatizing of the th- of the, of the disease is the thing that's stopping the disease from being cured because the more you stigmatize people, the harder it is for them to say, "I've got this disease."
[00:36:26] Roisin: Uh, maybe that's why what you were telling me earlier, it's treated as a sep- [00:36:30] separately in, in American health data. Um, it's a, it's this huge stigma attached to HIV. I don't know that there's any other disease in our lifetimes that has the same stigma I don't think so. I mean, and it's connected to sex, it's connected to being gay, [00:36:45] which is taboo, you know, all this stuff.
[00:36:46] Roisin: So there was a recognition that we can't shout from the rooftops about the fact that this group is at high risk, but we need to start working on doing something about it. So it was starting, so it was in about 2010 that, yeah, this, [00:37:00] uh, a lot of governments said, "Right, we are happy to start funding trans organizations because what you need is better situation, better, you know, maybe health checks."
[00:37:13] Roisin: You know, there's a whole sort [00:37:15] of, you have a bunch of demands, we have some public health requirements, let's work together and do this. Because what had been happening up until that point was money for HIV was going to LGBTIQ groups, and the trans people felt, that's not reaching us. So they [00:37:30] wanted to create their own trans groups, but they needed m- money, they needed all that.
[00:37:34] Roisin: So in order to, in order to h- get the money, they had to have a constituency. So who's our constituency? So that required saying to the [00:37:45] fa'afafines and the, and the wa- mahus and the moshés and the warias and the hijras and all, you're the constituency. We are the constituency. So they got them all together and said, we are this group that needs the help from the, [00:38:00] very much so from the Bill Gates Global Fund, because Bill Gates was also, his organization which fights TB, malaria, HIV, and AIDS, was starting to realize that also this is a, it's not just gay people.
[00:38:12] Roisin: There's actually this other whole entire other [00:38:15] network of trans-identified people. They're called different things in different places, but all those people are a high risk of HIV, and we need to get them on the radar. So there was money was gonna come, but who was it gonna go to? How do we organize [00:38:30] this group of people?
[00:38:31] Roisin: And somehow, uh, they set up an organization. They go to Barcelona and they try to get an agreement where they get the money from various organizations to channel them to trans people. But the only way they can do that is if they have a [00:38:45] dedicated trans organization. So a trans organization has been set up.
[00:38:48] Roisin: It's called GATE. Uh, you might have heard of it, um, Global Action for Trans Equality. Uh, it was started by two transmasc lesbians, um, one in Germany, one in Argentina [00:39:00] So this was the grand plan, but as I said, it was necessary to sort of unite all of these different people of various culturally third gender identities and make them feel like they were all part of one [00:39:15] global thing.
[00:39:16] Roisin: And how they did that was they, they had to just fi- they just had to hash it out at this meeting, and they-- It was-- I've written about this elsewhere. They... There was resistance from the old... So it's just really funny that [00:39:30] anyone thinks that there was any effort expended by national governments or international institutions like the WHO to help transvestite cross-dressers in the West.
[00:39:39] Roisin: Like, the idea that any of this was propelled by those people is just silly. But they were [00:39:45] there. They were there, but the problem was transsexual male prostitutes in European cities and all over the world who were vectors for HIV, and that was the issue. That was what got the governments involved. That's what got the public health authorities involved.
[00:39:58] Roisin: That's what got the money involved. That's what got Bill [00:40:00] Gates involved. Bill Gates is not getting involved because cross-dressers, you know, were invading women's spaces or, you know, making claims to being women that they had no right to or whatever. This was all the HIV project. So you have some minute-- you have some [00:40:15] discussion about it in some papers I found online, and where the transsexuals, the old school English transvestites, you know, objected to this depathologization because they saw themselves as really fully, properly having gender identity disorder, you know, a [00:40:30] proper condition that they could use to explain to their family members that they weren't perverts.
[00:40:34] Roisin: They were just m- they had this particular mental illness. So they were afraid of losing rights that they had fought for in the courts, if you s- see what I mean, by depathologizing everything and by... And then [00:40:45] travestis in Brazil, that's a whole other thing. The travestis don't claim to be men, but they do...
[00:40:49] Roisin: Uh, s- don't claim to be women, but they do claim to be men, but a type of man, you know? So, so they were like, "We don't wanna lose our word travesti. This is in our culture what we're known as." And other people were like, "Well, we're, we're [00:41:00] n- we're not this, and we're this, and this is important to us." People from, like these poor gays from Fa'afafine, from Tahiti or whatever, and from Java and from Mumbai and all, they were like, "What, what is all this?
[00:41:12] Roisin: We don't have any rights to lose. We don't [00:41:15] care," you know? And we... They, they couldn't even conceptualize that anyone would want to give them money and support them. Like, this is all brand new to them. They settled on the word trans Ultimately, um, they said, "Right, we'll not call it transgender, not [00:41:30] transsexual, not travesti, not fa'afafine.
[00:41:32] Roisin: We'll just- we'll all be covered under the blanket term trans," and that will be used as a way to, to channel the resources towards us, and we'll set up our own trans organizations and stuff. So that was all established sort of... That work [00:41:45] really got going in 2009, 2010. Um, and the, the first big ask was, yeah, to depathologize trans identity.
[00:41:54] Roisin: So that was the work that set in motion everything that came w- they got their wish in [00:42:00] the 2019 version of the ICD, where they changed categories from a mental illness to a sexual health condition related to sexual health. So that's the background. This group of men has been a target of [00:42:15] HIV/AIDS, uh, public health researchers, epidemiologists, anthropologists for a couple of decades now.
[00:42:23] Roisin: So that's why half of the guideline development group was made up of HIV researchers. So this brings me [00:42:30] to, um, the cl- the conflict that exists within that group trying to develop these guidelines and why it's taken so long and why it should've been a lot quicker, you would think, but it has taken so long.
[00:42:41] Roisin: So this Indian guy I talked to, um, I [00:42:45] don't know if I answered your question actually. You were saying they, they, they surely they don't want to... There's this colonial idea of, of putting these labels on, on people from different cultures. Absolutely, but when there's money involved, who cares? Let me, let me give you [00:43:00] another little demonstration of how this actually played out in, in reality.
[00:43:03] Roisin: I found a research paper, uh, by a person who used to identify as trans, a, a man I think, covering the- covering, uh, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, all these [00:43:15] Central Asian countries, talking about how the Global Fund, which is Bill Gates' Global Fund, had made the decision that, "Ah, okay, we are not gonna defeat this unless we target trans women with hyperfocus.
[00:43:28] Roisin: So we wanna make [00:43:30] sure that every... that the money that we give, it's not just give- given to local HIV groups or gay groups who say, 'Yeah, yeah, we'll make sure to target trans women in our services.' We wanna make sure that there's a trans woman in the room so that we know [00:43:45] exactly, uh, that somebody- that the right people are getting the money for this, because we've figured out that this is a high-risk group."
[00:43:50] Roisin: So every country that receives Global Fund money has a country coordinating board or something. There's a technical term for it, CCM or some- CCB, I can't [00:44:00] remember. And they- Bill Gates said starting from whatever year, I can't remember what it was, 2013 or something, all of these boards, if they wanna get Global Fund's money, they need to have a trans woman on it.
[00:44:09] Roisin: So- This person was talking about, this person who wrote this paper I [00:44:15] was reading, was talking about the clash of this public health need with loads of money attached to it, and prestige also of being able to say, "I'm, you know, working with global funds, like Bill Gates money and blah, blah, blah." This was something that people might be [00:44:30] attracted to doing, but do they recognize themselves in this trans label?
[00:44:34] Roisin: And that was what this thesis was about, was like how did people who were working as transsexual prostitutes in Uzbekistan, I think it was, adapt to this new framing that they were [00:44:45] supposed to take on if they wanted to have access to services that they needed? Um, and one of the... A- and, and this person described the situation of transsexual male prostitutes in that country.
[00:44:56] Roisin: And what, what they were doing was they could make mon- they could make more [00:45:00] money in Russia because there was money to be made as a she-male prostitute in Russia that there wasn't in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and so all this stuff. So they would get breast implants, go to Russia, work for a year, save up enough money to f- help their family or send [00:45:15] money back to their family, make loads of money, come back, and then get the breast removed, take, uh, breast, breast implants taken out So this, and they had a completely different name for that phenomenon, for those men, you know?
[00:45:28] Roisin: Same in Turkey, they had a different [00:45:30] name for them men. The, the, every country has, has this thing where gay men are working as sh- as shemale prostitutes that are high risk for HIV, and suddenly they become the target of all this money and attention. So this, this, this [00:45:45] thesis I read was talking about how to, to saying to someone like, "Do you see yourself as trans?
[00:45:50] Roisin: Can you, can you go along with this?" And the person is like, "Yeah, fuck it. I don't care." You know what I mean? Like, "Whatever. As long as I have a seat at the table, and I can distribute some of those funds, and we can get [00:46:00] services, and blah, blah, blah." And the, the thing that was figured out, um, by HIV researchers, people working in the, in the AIDS field, was that figure out what they want, give that to them, and then they'll take their AIDS drugs.
[00:46:12] Roisin: That, because what we really need is we need to know [00:46:15] who is HIV positive, who is on antiretrovirals, and, uh, what else do we need to know? Um, get them on PrEP or get them on whatever drugs they need, who are in their networks. We need this information, and we need them on drugs. So what do they want? What they want is hormones [00:46:30] and surgery, so let's give them hormones and surgery.
[00:46:32] Roisin: So that's the plan now, so that's being rolled out, um, in various places. Um, and that's sort of the background to how we got this situation with this guideline development group is, which as I said, is [00:46:45] half activists and half HIV/AIDS people. So this Indian guy starts explaining to me that we'll have the, the guidelines out by the end of the month, this month, and there's only one-- there's only today left for that to be true, so there's one day left for that to be true.
[00:46:58] Roisin: So either it means he was [00:47:00] lying to me or he was pretending he had knowledge that he doesn't actually have, or what's, I think... Yes?
[00:47:05] Stephanie: Let me just jump in here for our listeners. Uh- Oh, sorry ... we're recording this at the end of June, and this episode is going to be released mid to late July. [00:47:15] So that's the- Okay
[00:47:15] Stephanie: context here for listeners.
[00:47:17] Roisin: Yeah. So there's, um, so I was told it will be out by, by the end of June, and as I said, I'm worried about these guidelines because it's gonna be a real activist cudgel that's gonna be used against all the progress that's been made elsewhere. I suspect that [00:47:30] maybe the WPATH lawsuit might be holding up the release because it's gonna be very weird to have this, this, you know, this big news blast about the WPATH news, uh, lawsuit, and then suddenly for the WHO to come out and say, "Okay, everybody marble this [00:47:45] through your entire public health system," because that's what this man told me is the plan in these guidelines.
[00:47:49] Roisin: The plan in these guidelines is, sorry, a piece of paper here that I wrote it down before I got here. Basically to, um, [00:48:00] mainstream trans healthcare in the public health system, which in Europe would look like you go to your ordinary doctor and you say, "Hi, I'm trans. Can I have testosterone?" And your doctor says, "Yeah, sure.
[00:48:08] Roisin: Here you go. Here's your prescription." Um, the second thing is set up education for public [00:48:15] health, uh, people, uh, professionals, which including, including, um, knowl- knowledge hubs and, and knowledge centers and places where you can go to get resources to figure out how to do this. And he linked it to the SDGs, the, the Sustainable Development [00:48:30] Goals, interestingly.
[00:48:31] Roisin: Um, it has to be a human-centered approach, which means that it's gonna be affirmation. Um- That was my interpretation of it. What's holding up the discussions is the people in the [00:48:45] WHO want data to back all this up, and it has been difficult to get the data that proves that doing this has beneficial outcomes.
[00:48:55] Roisin: So that's the problem. And now I [00:49:00] think it's important to understand that you have, he told me above the guideline development group, which is activists and HIV people, you have the technical people who are just like, "Data, data, data. Where are the figures? Where, where are the numbers? I, I wanna see it." But within the group [00:49:15] itself, the HIV researchers have a different outcome expectations than the trans activists.
[00:49:22] Roisin: And this is where we- where what looks like a problem that they both shared or [00:49:30] a outcome that they both sought, you see that actually they don't have the same outcomes in mind because the endpoints for the HIV researchers is more people on PrEP, and it's more people on HIV systems, and [00:49:45] it's more people XYZ related to HIV, fewer AIDS deaths.
[00:49:49] Roisin: You know, they have all these outcomes that they want. Whereas the trans activists are like, "Give me what I want when I want it." And the others are like, "Well, if we do this, are we gonna get the outcome that [00:50:00] we desire? So we're only gonna do it if we've got data that shows that it works, and we want to make sure that we implement it in a way that gets us the data that we need and gets us the outcomes that we need from a public health perspective."
[00:50:13] Roisin: Whereas the transmasc [00:50:15] enbies and transvestites part of the group are just like, "No, g- just give me hormones. Just give us hormones." That's the whole principle. Like, that's the entire mission is give me what I want because I said so. And there you start [00:50:30] to see like, oh, this coalition, this collaboration that started over a decade ago where they said, "Oh, we have the same aims actually.
[00:50:36] Roisin: You wanna get, uh, you wanna improve the lives of trans people, so do we because we have a public health mission." Whereas the activists are just like, "I'm a narcissist who wants to force everybody to [00:50:45] pretend I'm the opposite sex because it's my personality." And now I think that's why the discussion has, this been so difficult.
[00:50:52] Roisin: And so this guy, this Indian guy hinted that to me by saying that, "Oh, they're very obsessed with data, and they want figures, and they want numbers, and oh, they're very [00:51:00] technical," and all this stuff, where we just say, "Roll it out and we'll get the data after we roll it out." So the trans activists in this group are saying basically implement the whole system, and then we will base, uh, they will use that as the experiment essentially to decide whether or [00:51:15] not this works to achieve your goals.
[00:51:17] Roisin: Because once it's rolled out, the activists have achieved their goals, which is give me what I want when I want. So that's what we're waiting, we're waiting for it to be released now, and I suspect maybe the WPATH news is [00:51:30] part of the reason why it hasn't been dropped yet.
[00:51:33] Stephanie: And when you say the WPATH news-
[00:51:36] Roisin: I thought you'd know more about that than I do.
[00:51:37] Roisin: I haven't followed it closely, but I know that the f- isn't it the Federal Trade Commission or-
[00:51:42] Stephanie: Oh, yeah. All I know is [00:51:45] that this probably has something to do with Glenna Goldis, um, who I'm proud to know. Uh, but she's been too busy to come on a podcast like mine since she got her job at the FTC. Um, so yeah, I know the FTC is suing [00:52:00] WPATH, but I don't know the details there.
[00:52:02] Stephanie: I'd love for you to spell out what you do know about the FTC suing WPATH and what that has to do with any slowdown with the WHO guidelines.
[00:52:11] Roisin: I don't know any of the details, um, at all, so I'm [00:52:15] not, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna try and guess it. But why I, I think if there is legal action against WPATH, it's gonna look very bad for the WHO's legitimacy.
[00:52:24] Roisin: I mean, all of this is very bad for the WH- WHO's legitimacy anyway. I cannot believe they got [00:52:30] themselves messed up in this because it's just gonna destroy their reputation. But I would imagine that for that institution to, to rega- retain any credibility that it has, it cannot come out with guidelines written by WPATH activists which [00:52:45] instruct, use its standing and its legitimacy to instruct all countries to To basic, to mainstream this WPATH nonsense through their health systems while there's a [00:53:00] media storm going on over WPATH being sued for, I, if I, if I understand correctly, it's essentially consumer fraud 'cause that's Glenna's thing, isn't it?
[00:53:10] Roisin: Um, that's where she's gone to work. So I suspect that that hasn't helped [00:53:15] the discussion at least because, I mean, if you remember that the... From my understanding with this guy, with this con- with the conversation with this guy is that the conflict is between the people who want data and to show that this is gonna actually achieve the aims that we've set out to achieve versus the ones who don't [00:53:30] want data and don't want any technical information and just want what they want and want it now.
[00:53:34] Roisin: If it's about the lack of data or the lack of evidence or something like that, then... I mean, don't forget, they just moved it from one category of the book into another category of the book. They didn't need, [00:53:45] they, they didn't work very hard on, on, on, you know, that was due to activist pressure and a realignment.
[00:53:50] Roisin: It was not based on the data, robust data that shows that this is a good thing that you should do and it has good outcomes. So they just moved the category [00:54:00] of it, and now they're going, they're going to retrofit that decision with the data, and they, they don't have it because it's trash, like as we all know.
[00:54:07] Roisin: So I think the difficulty now is with everything going on with WPATH, like maybe it will nuke the whole thing. That's what I would like to, to [00:54:15] find out about. I would like to hear.
[00:54:16] Stephanie: With regard to the ICD reclassification, um, I think we're on ICD-11 now, right?
[00:54:23] Roisin: Yes.
[00:54:24] Stephanie: Okay. Um, s- so, you know, the ICD is, as I understand it, is updated [00:54:30] more frequently than the DSM because here in the United States we're only on DSM-5.
[00:54:35] Stephanie: We're on ICD-11. Um, ICD's obviously a lot more comprehensive and global than the DSM. Um, but, uh, when [00:54:45] you say that gender issues have been reclassified from the psychiatric to the sexual health category, do you mean is it listed specifically as gender dysphoria, or are we talking some [00:55:00] other diagnosis?
[00:55:00] Stephanie: Because I know now there's a push to use the term gender incongruence
[00:55:05] Roisin: It's gender incongruence in the new, in the new classification Okay Uh, gender incongruence of childhood at least is in there. Um, but I, I could just look it up with you. [00:55:15] I don't, I don't really know anything more than just it's been reclassified.
[00:55:19] Stephanie: So laying this out for the layperson who's just hearing this stuff for the first time, in the International Classification for dis- of Diseases, uh, gender [00:55:30] incongruence, meaning a mismatch between the person's sexed body and their subjective sense of gender, whatever that means, right, is considered a sexual health condition.
[00:55:43] Stephanie: And I, I [00:55:45] wonder about how this intersects with some of the stuff that we've talked about on this podcast with people like Travis Morale and Eitan Haim, who have done good work exposing the insurance fraud aspect of things. So for [00:56:00] example, um, you know, and this is another thing that Glenn is going after as well, I believe, um, that there's a lot of fraudulent billing in the United States.
[00:56:10] Stephanie: So for example, billing for endocrine disorder, right? [00:56:15] Someone doesn't have an endocrine disorder, right? They, they might have perfectly normal levels of the hormones consistent with their natal sex, but they are diagnosed with endocrine [00:56:30] disorder by a gender clinic, and then the gender clinic effectively prescribes drugs that induce an endocrine disorder in that person.
[00:56:37] Stephanie: But the reason that they are doing the mental gymnastics of calling it an endocrine disorder is because they hold the [00:56:45] metaphysical belief that this woman is really a man, man is a woman, vice versa, right? This person is actually this other thing, and therefore their sex hormones are wrong for their sex, right?
[00:56:56] Stephanie: So there's a lot of mental gymnastics and, and [00:57:00] linguistic sleight of hand going on behind this stuff, but they're billing for diagnoses like gender incongruence, endocrine disorder. Um, you know, they, they treat, um... So when, when they talk about [00:57:15] mastectomies for girls, those are being billed as breast reductions, or they're- I've seen them billed as-
[00:57:21] Roisin: they're being called- ... scar repair.
[00:57:23] Stephanie: Interesting. Okay. And then there's labeling it gynecomastia, right? So if a male... [00:57:30] So it's all backwards, right? So when a m- man or a boy takes estrogen, usually in combination with something like spironolactone and maybe progesterone, it can induce [00:57:45] iatrogenic gynecomastia, right?
[00:57:46] Stephanie: So it can induce growth of breast tissue, um, which is not to say mammary glands, right? It's to say f- fat in the chest region. Um, and this is [00:58:00] actual gynecomastia, but then the, the people being documented as having gynecomastia are the girls who have actual mammary glands- Oh ... actual breast tissue. But they're men.
[00:58:12] Stephanie: Right? But, but, but they're, they're [00:58:15] classified as males with gynecomastia. And so, and, and part of the reason I'm explaining this is not just for, like, the insurance fraud medical billing angle of things, but it's also for the parents and the therapists in the audience, 'cause I know a lot of our [00:58:30] listeners are in one of those categories, some of them are in both, um, who are trying to understand what's going on with the weird things their kid is saying or their patient is saying.
[00:58:39] Stephanie: And so the, the kids, the, the victims in all this are [00:58:45] participating in that sleight of hand. So there are girls who are fully pursuing double mastectomies, but they say, they tell their parents they're pursuing a breast reduction, right? Which is what their doctor is saying to them. That's what they're calling it.
[00:58:59] Stephanie: [00:59:00] Or they say they're getting treatment for gynecomastia or for an endocrine disorder, right? Because in their minds, they are actually the opposite sex and they shouldn't have breast tissue, or they shouldn't have high levels of estrogen and progesterone, right?
[00:59:12] Announcer: Your trans-identified kid won't listen to [00:59:15] reason, because reason
[00:59:16] Stephanie: isn't what they need right now.
[00:59:18] Stephanie: They need a parent who knows how to communicate in an empathic yet strategic manner. ROGD Repair gives you over 120 lessons in the psychology and communication [00:59:30] tools that actually work when normal parenting doesn't. Plus Repair Bot, your 24/7 AI coach trained on my entire body of work, ready to help you navigate tough moments in real time.
[00:59:42] Stephanie: Visit ROGDRepair.com [00:59:45] and use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take half off your first month.
[00:59:51] Roisin: I think you're doing a really great job in the US of fighting back against this, and I think, uh... I mean, it's slow, but there's, there's definitely progress. Whereas in Europe, [01:00:00] we're kind of on the reverse track where, like, it's just getting bur- it's just burrowing into the institutions.
[01:00:06] Roisin: You know, like, um, a year or two ago s- I, I saw in these trans-masculine groups that they were all swapping the [01:00:15] insurance code that you need to quote to the insurance company to get, um, to get it classified as, uh, reimbursed as scar repair chest, on the chest. Um, and I've seen some other kinda scammy stuff, but the doctors were in on it as [01:00:30] well, you know.
[01:00:30] Roisin: Um, and then the insurance companies would have an ally inside the insurance company. They'd be swapping the name of the person that you can contact directly, and she'll fight on your behalf to get it reimbursed, you know. But what the, what's supposed to happen in principle with these new [01:00:45] WHO guidelines part- in, in...
[01:00:47] Roisin: I mean, you Americans don't care anymore 'cause you've got Trump, everything's fine. But, you know, um, we, our governments are very much, uh, adhere to all the, the instructions and the entreaties, and the treaties, and the conventions, and the, and the [01:01:00] memoranda of understanding, and the guidelines. You know, we very- it's like, how high do you want us to jump?
[01:01:05] Roisin: Um, so yeah, we, we're, we're not getting away from this anytime soon. Um, yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's an [01:01:15] incredible, it's an incredible story. And I realize now that I was telling you all this stuff about the HIV connection and about the situation in Europe, which doesn't map on very well to what happened in the US at all.
[01:01:27] Roisin: And I have had this theory for a long time that [01:01:30] it's almost the reverse of the colonization that we're used to thinking and talking about. So just to take my country, Ireland, the only trans people we had in Ireland were your classic cross-dress and [01:01:45] transvestite autogynephilic guy. You know, he decided when he was in his 40s that he wanted to cross-dress, that he couldn't hold it in anymore, and then he went out.
[01:01:52] Roisin: That, that was the only trans profile that, that existed in the country. And then all of a sudden You had [01:02:00] this push for, um, trans rights and then suddenly there was this international pressure on Ireland to introduce legal gender recognition. And what the original transsexuals wanted [01:02:15] was definitely to maintain this diagnosis that they had, that they were what they said, that they had this condition that made them different.
[01:02:23] Roisin: And so I think it was really useful for them to understand themselves and also to be able to explain to their boss, "I've got a condition. It's [01:02:30] in the ICD and I, you know, I get treated for it. It's called dysphoria," blah, blah, blah. They were a bit, um, wary of this, all these new young women with short hair saying, "Oh, get rid of all that, and the gatekeeping, and the diagnoses, and the labels, and the this and the that."
[01:02:44] Roisin: And they were [01:02:45] sort of like, "Well, how will people know then that we've got this special condition and we're not just transvestite cross-dressers?" Which is kind of what they were. Um, there was a resistance to it, but why, why, why did this resistance come to Ireland and immediately we got sex self ID, which is [01:03:00] self-declared self ID, which is the most extreme version of it?
[01:03:03] Roisin: Um, this is not long after Ireland had sort of shook, uh, shook what's- shucked the Catholic Church off its back. You know, it, it, it was just really, really [01:03:15] bizarre, sped up Um, um, and what I sometimes think is it's not that... A- and also it's important to note for American listeners that Barack Obama's, Barack Obama's LGBTIQ foreign policy, which he launched in [01:03:30] 2009, 2010, which was commandeered by Hillary Clinton as she was the Department of State, um, that all kicked off.
[01:03:39] Roisin: This is what they used to call on 4chan. I don't know if you know what 4chan is, but it's like this awful [01:03:45] website where people say very rude things. Global homo. So global homo came from 4chan, and essentially what it was, it was describing this turn in American foreign policy where Obama was like, "Right, that's it.
[01:03:55] Roisin: We're going all in on gay shit all over the world." So USAID started funding [01:04:00] all this stuff. So USAID goes out into the world to say, "We are gonna improve the lives of..." This is one of Barack Obama's... It was a values thing, you know? But it was also related to public health. It was also related to the HIV issue.
[01:04:12] Roisin: But it was related to the HIV issue in the sense [01:04:15] that gay men are overrepresented in HIV stats, and the worst thing you can do is do what Uganda did, which was criminalize homosexuality. Because if you criminalize homosexuality and then you have an open sore on your regions, a m- a gay man might have an open [01:04:30] sore somewhere, he's not gonna go to the doctor and say, "I've got this open sore," because the doctor's gonna say, "Where did you get it?
[01:04:34] Roisin: How did you get it?" Because he'll go, he'll be s- he'll be put in prison for life for being gay. So you h- you send it underground. You send H- you send HIV, AIDS, gay people underground if [01:04:45] you criminalize it, and that's why Barack Obama, out of his very noble intentions, wanted to fix this problem of the criminalization of HI- of gay people because it was not doing, as a values thing, as I said, but it was not doing any favors to the public health mission of ending AIDS, [01:05:00] which was really ramping up.
[01:05:01] Roisin: That mission was really ramping up when he got into office. So he was a trendsetter. He was a, he, he set the benchmark for everyone else. Um, but what, what happens is when you go into the outs- rest of the world outside [01:05:15] of America and outside of Europe and outside the Anglosphere or whatever, when you encounter what we call gay is what, what is actually trans or gender diverse.
[01:05:24] Roisin: Because, as I was saying earlier, these men occupy these different roles in [01:05:30] society. There is no gay, there is no village people in Senegal. You know, there is no gay clubs. These, these are men who are sometimes living as women or they're very much in the closet or whatever. So what, w- I think what the Americans went with all their money, the USAID was like, [01:05:45] "Right, where's all the, the gay people?"
[01:05:47] Roisin: And then figuring out that, oh, what we call gay actually manifests very differently over there. So it's, it's a reverse colonization. Those concepts of third genders were reimported back into America and re- and [01:06:00] applied to the American system. Do you see what I mean? I f- I think that's what happened in Ireland.
[01:06:05] Roisin: Maybe I'm not making much sense, but I, I feel like- That those third genders sort of expanded the, expanded our [01:06:15] understanding, expanded the acronym essentially. Because in order to, to... I'm not, I'm not saying that T and Q weren't already in the acronym when Obama... I mean, they were barely in it, but when, when USA started this mission, this global homo [01:06:30] mission.
[01:06:30] Roisin: Um, but it very much reinforced this idea that, oh, trans people have always existed, and there's all kinds of these genders all over the world. And that kind of messaging was reimported back into Western countries. So I [01:06:45] see it as that kind of double colonization going both ways, you know?
[01:06:48] Stephanie: It seems like it's what- whatever narrative is politically convenient at the moment.
[01:06:53] Stephanie: And, and the people behind this don't mind switching their story every five minutes. The goalposts keep shifting.
[01:06:59] Roisin: I [01:07:00] mean, if it is as I suspect, largely... A- and I mean, there are a million reasons why this, this thing happened, this phenomenon that you talk about all the time, that you write about, and that I talk about and write about all the time.
[01:07:11] Roisin: There's a million different things that contributed to it happening. But if I'm correct in [01:07:15] thinking that HIV and AIDS public health organizing was a huge part of it, and that is where the money came from. Because think about it. I always say to people, who gives, who gave a shit about cross-dressers, you know, enough to turn them [01:07:30] into a, the civil rights movement?
[01:07:32] Roisin: It wasn't. It was a global thing, and there was so much money involved. Um- You know, the- it's funny because a couple of years ago I wrote, I wrote an article about this, and it's just [01:07:45] really shocking. Um, it- London Pride two or three years ago, the director of London Pride got up on a stage and he said, he said a really weird statement, and everyone in the crowd just went, "What?"
[01:07:58] Roisin: He said, "If we can end [01:08:00] the wait for gender-affirming care, we can end AIDS by 2030." That's what he said. And everyone made that face that you're making right now, and it's because if you can offer hormones and surgeries to transsexual [01:08:15] prostitutes, you'll get them into the clinic and you'll get them on PrEP, and we'll end this epidemic.
[01:08:19] Roisin: And that is a global thing, and every country is on these targets. Have I lost you now, or are you just... You're making faces.
[01:08:26] Stephanie: No, I'm, I'm following along, and for people who are just listening, [01:08:30] I'm, I'm making, yes, I'm making strange faces. But please go on. You're cooking.
[01:08:36] Roisin: Um, sorry. I said... What did I say? The guy who, the head of HIV.
[01:08:39] Roisin: What did I say? The head, head of the Terrence, uh, Terrence Higgins Trust. Sorry. The biggest HIV charity in England. I, I [01:08:45] can't remember what I actually said. I think I said, I said the wrong thing. The head of the Terrence Higgins Trust said, "We- if we end- if we can give hormones at clinics, we'll end AIDS."
[01:08:52] Roisin: This is what he said in front of a crowd of thousands of people, and everyone went, "What?" And the first thing that everyone thought was, "Are you gonna, [01:09:00] like, trans away the gay or something? Like, whoa, what's going on here? Like, what, what do you mean? Like, people won't be having sex because they're being sterilized by gender drugs?"
[01:09:09] Roisin: Like, whatever. And I was like, "No, I've been saying this for years and nobody cares." It's because the way to [01:09:15] get trans she-ma prostitutes into the clinic is by giving- to get on the AIDS drugs, you give them the thing that they want. And one of the other things that... Now, this has been a global goal for many, many years, and it's written everywhere.
[01:09:27] Roisin: In every UN AIDS document you'll ever read, [01:09:30] it's in there. It's plain as day. It's black and white. It's clear. Couldn't be any clearer. If we wanna end AIDS, we need to do something about trans women. Thing to do is to combine whatever they do want with this thing that we want them to take, and also, um, they need legal gender [01:09:45] recognition.
[01:09:45] Roisin: They need legal gender recognition because this is the thing that causes them issues with police, with doctors, with blah, blah, blah. So we want their identities to be recognized. Now, we've had 14 years of gender self ID. Uh, it- Argentina was the first one to introduce it [01:10:00] in 2012. So we've had years now to, to test the hypothesis.
[01:10:04] Roisin: Does legal gender recognition improve the lives of transsexual prostitutes who are at high risk of HIV? And the answer is unequivocally it does not. So all of the pain that we've [01:10:15] been through in the UK, in Ireland, in all these places- I think the legal gender recognition was a little bit like gay marriage.
[01:10:23] Roisin: Nobody was gonna go and do it. They ju- it was the principle of bringing more people into the fold of [01:10:30] justice, i- if you see what I mean. When I first started researching this, I was going into Facebook groups of these men and trying to figure out, you know, looking for h- the, uh, s- trying to see if they were getting legal gender recognition.
[01:10:44] Roisin: They weren't. None of [01:10:45] them got it. They don't want it. It's not a thing that they want. It was sort of a symbolic way to say, "We accept that you, you know, are, uh, f- we recognize you. You're valid." You know, it was a little bit like that. Very few people took, took them up on it, the [01:11:00] people who... Like, all the transmascs did, of course, but the, the men who it was originally designed to, whose suffering it was designed to alleviate or whose marginalization it was designed to fix, they weren't getting it, and if they did, it didn't improve their [01:11:15] lives.
[01:11:15] Roisin: So the introduction of these policies that h- we have been tearing our hair over in the West, and that has just... And this contagion, as it goes along, it sucks in all these young women, which is a completely different cohort, you know. So [01:11:30] all, all of this has been ultimately for nothing, you know? Um, yeah, and, I mean, it does apply to the States in the sense that a lot of this came from the...
[01:11:42] Roisin: You know, Hillary Clinton, when she [01:11:45] was secretary of state, she gave a talk at an LGBTIQ fundraiser. It w- she did her gay rights are human rights. She had said that about women back in 1995 in Beijing, "Women's rights are human rights," and she got a big round of applause, so she did it again in 2012 or whatever, and [01:12:00] she said, "Gay rights are human rights."
[01:12:01] Roisin: And everyone, "Well, hey." And she said in that same speech, "Change the law, and then the, the, the people will follow. It ha- has a, laws have a teaching effect," is what she said. So what she was saying is [01:12:15] introduce legal gender recognition, decriminalize homosexuality, do all this stuff, and then the hearts and minds will follow.
[01:12:20] Roisin: You don't have to do any convincing of anything. So they just sort of bulldozed through all these cultures via USAID money, you know. And I was really happy when [01:12:30] Trump cut a lot of that off. Not the PEPFAR stuff, obviously, because that was, that's helping a lot of people with AIDS, but you've no idea what USAID was paying for in terms of trans stuff in Ireland, in Belgium, in Europe.
[01:12:41] Roisin: It was just out of this world. Like, you know, [01:12:45] uh, paying for lo- paying for NGOs to lobby for legal gender recognition. Uh, it was paying for all these organizations. It was paying for all kinds of cultural programs, everything. Um, and I was really glad s- I, I whooped with joy when I found out that Trump was [01:13:00] cutting it all.
[01:13:00] Stephanie: It's really so maddening when, when you, when you, when you put it all out there like that. Like, like, here's what these People, these organizations, [01:13:15] NGOs, Bill Gates, I don't know. H- here's what they're not willing to do. They're not willing to actually crack down on prostitution or lift people out of poverty, right?
[01:13:21] Stephanie: Oh no,
[01:13:22] Roisin: the opposite.
[01:13:22] Stephanie: That's-
[01:13:23] Roisin: No,
[01:13:23] Stephanie: no,
[01:13:23] Roisin: the opposite ...
[01:13:24] Stephanie: like, the problem is that the, I mean, I mean, [01:13:30] oh, there's so many layers to it. Like, like you pointed out, the murder rate. The, the so-called trans genocide that's supposedly happening, it's third world prostitutes. It's- Yeah ... like you say, truly the most marginalized people in the [01:13:45] world, which have nothing to do with your comfortable, upper middle class, suburban, educated kids who are the sons and daughters of the parents who come to me for professional help, right?
[01:13:56] Stephanie: Not the same category, not the same lived experience, [01:14:00] right? We're talking about People from, in some cases, developing nations, people from poverty, and where various cultural and sociological factors and family [01:14:15] factors affect how, um, same-sex attraction is handled in the family and the society. And so these young people with very little money, very little social support, very little access to [01:14:30] healthcare end up turning to a life of crime that makes them marginalized, that exposes them to disease risk.
[01:14:39] Stephanie: I mean, we're, we're talking about a unique set of problems here that some people in the world are [01:14:45] really facing. And what's the solution? Is it, is it to fix the root of the problem that's driving these young men to sell their bodies in the first place? Is it fixing the problem of sex trafficking? No.
[01:14:59] Stephanie: It's not any of [01:15:00] that. It's, well, people are going to do this, and it feels like the global elite are benefiting from it continuing to go on because, like you say, there's no accountability on the buyer side, right? We don't know who these men are who [01:15:15] are visiting these prostitutes and paying for their services, right?
[01:15:19] Stephanie: But what do they have to do with the global elite? Maybe there's some overlap there, right? So it's like they want the problem to continue, but then make it look like they're doing [01:15:30] something about it. And so the solution is you continue allowing these young men to live these tragic lives, but you say, "Hey, we can get them on PrEP if we give them a free donut," you know, HRT, right?
[01:15:44] Roisin: [01:15:45] It's... Well, it's the principle of harm reduction. Yeah. And so that's why these same organizations, they have a list of asks that they claim is gonna end AIDS. And if I told- they would make your hair stand on end. I know we've talked for a long time, and you probably wanna get rid of me now 'cause I've said so much, but I [01:16:00] would just like to point out some of the other policies that are so bananas.
[01:16:02] Roisin: Please do. So everyone's on a mission to end HIV/AIDS, end HIV/AIDS. It's the, the, the deadlines are, are approaching. In, in 2023, the [01:16:15] International Commission of Journa- of Jurists put out a document that was really controversial 'cause it contained some really weird, uh, recommendations on how to end AIDS, and some of them are just bananas, the ones that we were talking about.
[01:16:28] Roisin: Um, [01:16:30] so and they called them the March... Oh, they called them the March AIDS Principles, International Women's Day. Awful. So they... One of the things, one of the things that they want [01:16:45] is- No one can be criminal, made criminally liable for knowingly passing on HIV to someone else. So that's
[01:16:59] Roisin: The [01:17:00] logic, I've read it. I have to keep reading. Every time I read it, I have to read it again. Nobody, uh, nobody should be held criminally liable on the basis their conduct alleged to be harmful to their own pregnancy, transmitting HIV to their fetus. There was something in [01:17:15] about children having sex with each other.
[01:17:17] Roisin: They shouldn't be criminalized either. And it was worded in a way that kicked off a storm and drew attention to the document. But I think what they were saying, uh, this is what they said. "In this con- the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity [01:17:30] of persons under 18 of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and the right to be heard in matters concerning them.
[01:17:37] Roisin: Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them with due regard to their age, maturity, and best [01:17:45] interests," which sounded to a lot of people like, wait, they can make decisions to have sex with people who are ad- over, like who are adults.
[01:17:51] Roisin: So it kicked off a storm, but, um, next thing, the exchange of se- so y- it just shows you, like, decriminalize everything, [01:18:00] everything with this mission to end HIV/AIDS, and this is the, I keep calling it a peer. It's gonna be, they're gonna end AIDS, but what are we gonna have lost in the meantime? Like sex work, the exchange of sexual services between consenting adults for money, goods, and services, advertising, sharing of [01:18:15] premises, basically brothels.
[01:18:16] Roisin: None of this cannot be criminalized. "May not prescribe the conduct of third parties directly or indirectly for receipt of financial or material benefit." Pimps, so legalized pimping. You cannot, yeah, HIV [01:18:30] non-disclosure, decriminalized drug use- I'm sorry, what
[01:18:32] Stephanie: are you reading from?
[01:18:34] Roisin: Sorry. So the International Commission of Jurists, uh, which is aligned with UN AIDS, it's one of these, uh, they, they get involved in international court cases.
[01:18:43] Roisin: They helped, they helped organize [01:18:45] the Yogyakarta Principles. They're, they're one of these organizations that advocate for all these progressive causes, and they have... And it's basically lawyers, progressive lawyers from around the world all join up and say, "How can we, you know, do progressive things together?"
[01:18:58] Roisin: So a couple year- in 2023, on [01:19:00] the 8th of March, they released the 8th of March Principles, and the 8th of March is Women's Day, which is extra insulting. And basically, the reason I brought it up is because you were saying, like, look at all the ways that they're, look at their methods. The methods to end AIDS are gonna [01:19:15] be, are so destructive.
[01:19:16] Roisin: So they're like, let kids make ch- let kids have sex. Doesn't, it didn't say, you know, with whom. Uh, it says d- don't criminalize someone for not disclosing that they have HIV before they have sex with someone. Le- legalize [01:19:30] all drugs, legalize prostitution, legalize pimping. And the mad story I want to tell you was in, in Fr- so European countries, um, have largely all signed on to this deal that if you find out that a s- an asylum seeker, a refugee, so somebody who's not allowed [01:19:45] to be in the country, somebody who has no right to stay in the country, if you find that they are HIV positive, they have the right to stay.
[01:19:51] Roisin: Because the reason they have the right to stay is because then they get on treatment. Um, and so I heard [01:20:00] that somebody told me that they heard that they were, because HIV is no longer, it's just a chronic disease, it's no longer a death sentence, you just manage it with PrEP, some people were deliberately getting infected with HIV in Paris.
[01:20:12] Roisin: Uh, there was a way of doing it, and [01:20:15] as a result they were able to stay in France forever as long as they s- kept going to the clinic to get their PrEP. But wait, it gets worse. Then as, so I started looking into this to see if it was true, and I found a story of a guy from, uh, who was living in, in France for years and he had AIDS.[01:20:30]
[01:20:30] Roisin: And what he was doing was refugees would arrive in the country, they would pay him huge sums of money, they would give him their, uh, uh, demand for HIV tests, and he would go to the hospital on their behalf, and he would get tested, and [01:20:45] he would be shown to have HIV, and they would get to stay in the country for free.
[01:20:48] Roisin: And he did that for hundreds of people until they figured out that this was the same guy's blood. So this guy who was infected with HIV was going into hospitals on behalf of other people, and he had a female accomplice who was doing it for females, [01:21:00] and he got put in prison. So, um, just to illustrate the perverse incentives that have, that have, you know, i- in this mission-
[01:21:08] Stephanie: The incentives are so messed up.
[01:21:12] Stephanie: And, and that list of things you [01:21:15] read that they're advocating for, it, it's really hard to make the case that that is going to fix anything. I, I think I should explain to our audience that thing I was explaining to you before we started recording. [01:21:30] Um, and, and you had briefly mentioned this earlier in our conversation today, but it has to do with the confidentiality of HIV/AIDS information in the United States.
[01:21:39] Stephanie: Um, so for the audience's context here, before we started recording, um, we [01:21:45] were talking a little bit about the differences in American versus European healthcare systems, and I was telling Roisin that I've been through a little healthcare saga recently that I was just venting to another guest Diana Lutfiy, [01:22:00] uh, in the context of our conversation about American healthcare and science wars.
[01:22:06] Stephanie: And so you can listen to my conversation with Diana Lutfiy if you wanna hear my personal saga of fighting to get the right [01:22:15] diagnosis and treatment, and what would've happened if I hadn't had the skills to advocate for myself, how I wouldn't have had the right diagnosis, and I potentially would've been given a treatment that could've really harmed me.
[01:22:27] Stephanie: So anyway, Roisin and I were talking [01:22:30] about that story a little bit before we started recording, and as I was learning about her investigative journalism into the HIV issue, plus the fact that she's dealing with different healthcare systems than I am, I, I realized I had this one little piece of data that might be [01:22:45] interesting for her, which is that in America...
[01:22:48] Stephanie: I, I mean, we were comparing and contrasting all kinds of things, like how our diagnoses follow each, follow us around here in a different way than they do in, uh, Belgium, where she is. Um, but [01:23:00] there's this one little piece of data which is that when you sign a release of information to authorize your healthcare providers to exchange information about your healthcare, in the United States, HIV/AIDS information is its own [01:23:15] category that you have to check the box for.
[01:23:18] Stephanie: So if you're authorizing, let's say, your previous therapist to release your records to your new therapist, your therapist to release your records to your psychiatrist, or vice versa, [01:23:30] or you're authorizing your old doctor to release information to your new doctor or a specialist or anything like that There is a specific checkbox for authorizing the release of information about HIV [01:23:45] and AIDS information separate from the rest of your health record, separate from the rest of your mental health record.
[01:23:50] Stephanie: There's also, by the way, I don't know if this is related or not, but when it comes to mental health, substance abuse is also its own category that you have [01:24:00] to separately check the box for. So for example, if you have a history of being treated for depression and alcoholism, you would have to specifically authorize that drug and alcohol treatment records be shared.
[01:24:13] Stephanie: You'd have to specifically [01:24:15] request that. Otherwise, providers do not have the right to assume that you want that information shared. So substance abuse treatment is its own category, and HIV/AIDS information is its own category, and the way [01:24:30] that it's put forward on these forms makes you not wanna check that box.
[01:24:35] Stephanie: And I say this as someone who this, this does not apply to me. I do not have HIV or AIDS. It's not something that I, you know, personally have [01:24:45] had to think about. But I know that when I'm a patient and I'm handled, handed that form and I'm checking the box, "Do I authorize information about my HIV status?" I don't check that box.
[01:24:55] Stephanie: In my case, it doesn't make a difference if I do or not because there's nothing to share. [01:25:00] But someone who does have HIV or AIDS would specifically have to say that they want that shared. It is one of the most protected parts of their health record, and I can understand, you know, in an absence of other [01:25:15] context around this, I can understand why that's protected because of shame and stigma and stuff like that.
[01:25:19] Stephanie: But at the same time, this is a public health crisis. It is a sexually transmitted disease, and Roisin is pointing out there's all these other ways that people are being protected [01:25:30] from, you know, prosecution for knowingly spreading this harmful disease, which could be a malicious act. Um, I mean, there's something bizarre going on there, and I just felt like I wanted listeners to understand that context.
[01:25:44] Roisin: I [01:25:45] think AIDS is just treated so differently from other conditions, and I think one of the reasons is because, the first reason is because of stigma, um, and that was especially true back in the day. Um, I'm just reading here that it was very much the [01:26:00] case. Uh, apparently in the US 32 states still criminalize, uh, non-disclosure.
[01:26:05] Roisin: What is it? Criminalize what? It still criminalizes HIV exposure. So yeah, there are these hangover laws in, in half of the states that, that say that, um, [01:26:15] you can be prosecuted. So they d- they don't wanna... But that's the thing, like that doesn't happen with any other conditions, it's treated so specially.
[01:26:25] Roisin: First of all, there's a stigma. They don't wanna attach any stigma to the people who have AIDS or who, [01:26:30] uh, who have HIV, sorry. And the other reason is because it's just this, this public health mission that is so huge. Everywhere, every Pride parade, [01:26:45] I go to Pride parades just to check out how insane they are, and every time there's, like, huge contingent of you versus you.
[01:26:51] Roisin: You know, this is the, this is the camp- this is the, the current manifestation of the End AIDS campaign is U=U. [01:27:00] Undetectable equals untransmissible. And what that means is if you take your pills every day Um, you will get your level of circulating virus down so low that it'll be undetectable. And [01:27:15] if you, if you are undetectable, you can't transmit it.
[01:27:17] Roisin: So they're basically saying, "Take PrEP, have sex with whoever you want, uh, and it'll all be good." I was at Dublin Pride a couple of days ago, and from the stage at a, in a, at a festival, Pride festival where there were just hundreds, thousands of kids, [01:27:30] there were two gay guys talking about, "Un- untransmissible, uh, undetectable, untransmissible.
[01:27:34] Roisin: I am the safest butt to fuck tonight in, in, in this whole place because I've been taking PrEP." You know, it's just like there was a time when the message was, [01:27:45] "Stay out of the bathhouses. Stop being so promiscuous. Stop fucking around so much. Keep yourself clean. Look after your health. Don't be taking so many drugs.
[01:27:51] Roisin: Stop taking poppers. They're really bad for your health. And eat g- eat well, sleep well," you know? And now it's like, "Go, just go wild. Just take your [01:28:00] drugs." And it just seems like a really messed up thing. Also, when you consider, as we were talking about, all these other lists of, um, lists of thi- conditions that have been made, circumstances, decriminalization, legalization, [01:28:15] whatever.
[01:28:15] Roisin: Right? Belgium is the best, most progressive country in the world today. They've not just decriminalized prostitution and drugs and everything, they've also now, like, just turned pimping and, and prostitution into a regular job, so you get pension benefits, and you have to register this and [01:28:30] that, and you've...
[01:28:30] Roisin: You know, it's like it's all... And these are... I see that as not just a woke progressive thing. I see it as largely part of the AIDS infrastructure. Um, 2030 is the big goal. I think they're gonna make it now. Trump put a, put a big bump in [01:28:45] the road with, um, his withdrawal from, from lots of, lots of different programs that were being supported by the Department of State.
[01:28:51] Roisin: But I think they're gonna manage it because it was so well advanced. The project was so well advanced that the infrastructure is there in a lot of the places. So yeah, what kind of a victory is it gonna be the [01:29:00] day that people, uh, somebody at the WHO or wherever, the UN, stands at a pulpit and says, "We did it.
[01:29:06] Roisin: We defeated AIDS"? And it's like, yeah, but what else did we lose along the way, you know?
[01:29:10] Stephanie: Are you a therapist in need of continuing education that's not over-the-top [01:29:15] woke? Check out my colleague Lisa Mustard's podcourses. All of her podcourses are approved by the National Board for Certified Counselors.
[01:29:23] Stephanie: Right now, Lisa is offering my listeners an incredible deal. Get all 27 podcourses for only [01:29:30] $44. That could meet almost all of your continuing education needs for the year Visit lisamustard.com/podcourses and use code SOMETHERAPIST to take $5 off of her $49 podcourse bundle. Again, [01:29:45] use code SOMETHERAPIST at lisamustard.com/podcourses.
[01:29:49] Stephanie: I'll include that link and coupon in the show notes for your convenience. All right, now back to the show. It just seems so far removed from any wisdom [01:30:00] or sensibility. I mean, at what point, just, just thinking really existentially here about human life. You know, in life you encounter consequences.
[01:30:11] Stephanie: Sometimes you encounter [01:30:15] random fortune and misfortune, and how you interpret that is a personal choice. Um, but, uh, but sometimes you encounter the consequences of your own actions. And doing something like coming down with a really [01:30:30] terrible disease after a life of promiscuity, I would put that in the category of natural consequences.
[01:30:37] Stephanie: And at what point when you encounter the consequences of your own actions do you stop and reassess, "Am I [01:30:45] making good decisions?" Like, do I need a new direction for my life?
[01:30:51] Roisin: You could also acquire HIV from not a promiscuous life. You know, there's also that possibility. But I see your point, and I see... And I think it was this [01:31:00] de-stigmatization drive that started in 2001 that was the real, that was really...
[01:31:04] Roisin: 'Cause don't stigmatize anything. So I saw guys r- like, in leather pub outfits, like, you know, beside kids in this parade the other day, and it's just like you can't stigmatize anything, so you can't say [01:31:15] anything. It's all has to be fine. It's all, like... It was this idea that you cannot criticize any of it. Um, and there were
[01:31:22] Stephanie: lots of- Well, and, and they call it a type of harm reduction.
[01:31:27] Stephanie: And, uh, it's, when we- Apparently. This is
[01:31:28] Roisin: what they say, yeah ...
[01:31:29] Stephanie: when we [01:31:30] talk about harm reduction, we see so many failures and unintended consequences. I mean, look at places like Portland and Seattle and San Francisco, which have had harm reduction campaigns with regard to really deadly [01:31:45] drugs. Um, a recent episode, uh, with Ryan Rogers, we talked about some other newer kinds of drugs that I didn't even know existed until he came on my show to talk about them.
[01:31:58] Stephanie: But setting aside, [01:32:00] setting aside the gas station drugs that he talked about, you know, um- Oh, yeah like, just, uh, classic, you know, opiates, right? Like, these harm reduction campaigns that go around giving people clean [01:32:15] needles to shoot up with. Like, they're keeping people on the brink of death. They're not improving anyone's quality of life.
[01:32:21] Stephanie: Um, they're not saving anyone from a terrible fate. They're just keeping people hovering on the brink of death, and it's like what is the point of that? [01:32:30] Keeping people alive- Right ... a little longer but keeping them in hell? Like, that is what so many harm reduction policies seem to boil down to.
[01:32:39] Roisin: A lot of the earlier Open Society Foundations work was on harm reduction drugs, [01:32:45] uh, drugs, drug harm reduction, prostitution harm reduction.
[01:32:48] Roisin: If your mission is to end the circulation of HIV, then this is a perfect policy. But for all other policies, it's just a kind of a disaster. Like, [01:33:00] so if you, if you look at it that way, like, what benefit is there of the, the f- you know- This, uh, and the, there's more money in HIV and AIDS than there is in any other public
[01:33:12] Stephanie: policy.
[01:33:12] Stephanie: I don't know- Wait, how do these policies actually [01:33:15] fix HIV though? Because it seems to me like people are being encouraged to have more casual sex in high-risk communities.
[01:33:23] Roisin: They're being encouraged. So with the drugs, they're being encouraged to use, they're given clean needles so they don't spread HIV that way.
[01:33:29] Roisin: So [01:33:30] in Eastern Europe and in Russia, the big mode of transmission of HIV is, uh, needles, is drug use. In Africa, it's, uh, mother-to-child transmission, and I suspect that's because you can't be [01:33:45] gay in Africa, so all the gay men are married with kids, and they're having gay sex, and then they're passing it on to their wives and kids.
[01:33:50] Roisin: But we don't talk about that 'cause it's stigmatizing. But it's easier to talk about the drug needle stuff in Eastern Europe, uh, and Russia because it's less stigmatizing. But [01:34:00] that, um, that's how that's supposed to work. But with the PrEP, what they did, what happened the first 20, 30 years of AIDS was they tried to...
[01:34:09] Roisin: What was the slogan? There was a slogan like, you know, it wasn't keep it in your pants, but something like that. There was [01:34:15] some slogan . It should've been keep it in your pants. But it was like, you know, there's an epidemic, stay home, keep clean. You know, there was just like, behave yourself. This has gotten out of hand.
[01:34:24] Roisin: You know, you're all banging each other. Like, just calm down a bit. You know, we have an issue here. [01:34:30] People are dying. Um, but it just didn't work because people be fucking. Like, that's just the way it is. And, uh, m- gay, gay men are men, and men have very different sex drives, uh, to us. But gay men and straight men have the same [01:34:45] sex drives to each other.
[01:34:45] Roisin: They're all men. And they just kept, you know, it wasn't working. As a public policy, it just wasn't working because, and, and especially in places like, you know, anywhere where it has to go underground, like Africa or whatever, [01:35:00] uh, safe sex is just not possible. You know? It's not, you can't go, you can't go to the cl- to, to the mobile clinic and get con- and, and get condoms, you know, because you're shagging a man behind your wife's back.
[01:35:14] Roisin: Like, [01:35:15] it's just, it's very complicated when it's all illegal and all this stuff, you know? So they were like, "Right, that didn't work. What we're gonna do instead is we're gonna just make it, ma- find a way..." Well, drugs were just under development at the time. The, the first PrEP [01:35:30] drug, I think, was approved and put on the market in 2012.
[01:35:33] Roisin: All of this was all happening basically the same time. Um, was it Gilead? Gilead had the first PrEP drug. It was, I can't even remember what it's called now. Um- A- and si- and since then, [01:35:45] that's gone off patent, and since then, other ones have been introduced. And now you're gonna- now you're gonna have a twice yearly shot of PrEP.
[01:35:52] Roisin: So this is gonna be great for the guys who can't get it together to take a pill every day, because it's, it's hard to remember to take a pill every day when you're having [01:36:00] chem sex parties, uh, for three days straight every week. So now you're gonna get two shots every year. So basically, at Dublin Pride at the weekend, that's what they were saying, is like, "You can fuck anyone you want.
[01:36:10] Roisin: Uh, everyone, millions of people, do what you want, and you're free and safe as long as you just [01:36:15] take this drug." So it's just, it's a capitalist's dream, obviously. Like, get every single person on this drug. Um, you know, they're gonna hand it out cheaply in Africa and places where they don't have the resources for it and all.
[01:36:29] Roisin: You know, it's just [01:36:30] like, oh God, are we gonna celebrate this as a success? Like, this sounds awful, you know? And then, like, no restraints, no nothing, you know?
[01:36:38] Stephanie: Well, and here I was thinking that we were gonna learn about the new WHO guidelines, [01:36:45] but we-
[01:36:46] Roisin: The main takeaway of that is that you're getting trans in your healthcare, uh, whether you like it or not.
[01:36:50] Roisin: But yeah, that was, um-
[01:36:52] Stephanie: Wow ...
[01:36:52] Roisin: a bit of a tangent.
[01:36:54] Stephanie: I mean, excellent work exposing these hidden connections that [01:37:00] I, I wouldn't have even known to go looking for this one, and you found it.
[01:37:05] Roisin: Well, i- if you read enough research into the origins of trans, you just- HIV just comes up all the time.
[01:37:11] Stephanie: And then they rope in the girls, and they create the, the [01:37:15] perfect social contagion to get to the girls so that there's this, you know, sweet and innocent-looking cover story and this-
[01:37:20] Roisin: I would challenge it a little bit in that- The girls were reading Judith Butler, and they were studying humanities stuff, and they were kind of, they [01:37:30] were transmascs.
[01:37:31] Roisin: You know, they would've be- they, they, they liked the idea of messing with gender. And I think that the girls were able to provide the sort of intellectual backup for what all [01:37:45] this was to f- on one hand, a group of AGPs from England and, you know, the Nordics sort of who, who, who said, "I have a sickness," you know, "and I'm being treated for my sickness."
[01:37:59] Roisin: And then you [01:38:00] had the fa'afafines and everything who haven't got a clue and just, like, you know, they're told that there's money going around if you can pretend to be trans. And this coalition was rounded off then by all these young academics, all these very fairly [01:38:15] well-to-do girls in Spain and in France who connected these three and started this, uh, these, these depathologization campaigns.
[01:38:24] Roisin: So it w- it was a sort of this trio, and a very unlikely [01:38:30] trio, who sort of were able to bounce off each other for the benefits they brought to each other and make this coalition. It was a coalition of convenience. And, um, you know, what the, the transvestites lacked in organization and, and, and slogan, [01:38:45] uh, in, uh, and, like, protest energy, you know, the girls brought that.
[01:38:49] Roisin: The young women brought that, and they brought the, the theories from academia, and they brought the organizational skills and the, you know, all that stuff, the, the energy, you know? So [01:39:00] they really wanted this too. Like, that's one thing I think that people skip over a lot or they neglect to talk about in all of this.
[01:39:06] Roisin: There's this reason and that reason. Some people just really, really want this, and there's a lot of young women who really, really, really want this. Um, and they [01:39:15] will do anything to, to make it real that they are men and, uh, you know, they have a lot of energy. You know these, you know these women. So I think they've done a lot of harm.
[01:39:27] Roisin: I sometimes, uh, get angry at them for their [01:39:30] narcissism because It's quite narcissistic to, you know, thing to do, I think, on their behalf. Um, and I, I wonder if that's linked [01:39:45] to the high rates of autism. Sometimes I think, I'm not saying people with autism are narcissistic, but there's a lot of concentration on the self and the self's i- inner world and needs and, I don't know.
[01:39:56] Roisin: You're, you're a therapist. Maybe you know.
[01:39:58] Stephanie: I think that's a conversation for [01:40:00] another time. But, um, yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a lot of overlap between autism and narcissism, and it's, it's difficult to talk about because we like to think in, in these kind of neat, rigid categories that oversimplify things.
[01:40:12] Stephanie: And we think of people with autism as people with [01:40:15] disabilities, so we think of them as, as victims who need to be protected, right? And we think of narcissists as, uh, the opposite of victims. We, we think of them as the aggressors, as the perpetrators. And that fits, that all fits very [01:40:30] neatly into the drama triangle of victim, rescuer, and perpetrator.
[01:40:33] Stephanie: And if you're a rescuer, then you're gonna be very drawn to choosing sides in that battle. Uh, the reality is much, much messier, that there is, there is overlap between autism and narcissism. And, [01:40:45] um, and having experienced, uh, that up close and personal with people in my life, um, it, it definitely raises some pretty fundamental questions of responsibility.
[01:40:57] Stephanie: Um, and, and [01:41:00] I, I say this having seen people, uh, autistic people who, you know, took pretty seriously the need to learn workarounds for understanding people and how to communicate with them and how to take perspectives. Um, [01:41:15] but there are also autistic people who had the intellectual capacity to do that and chose not to use it in a way that was pro-social, and have, and have been really hurtful to other people in ways that are identical to the ways that mal- malignant narcissists are hurtful.
[01:41:29] Stephanie: Uh, so that's a [01:41:30] conversation for another time. If anyone has an idea for a great guest to have that conversation with, please drop your idea in the comments. And I always forget, by the way, and I know it's late in the conversation to say this, but I have just been reminded that I should be reminding people to please leave a rating and [01:41:45] review.
[01:41:45] Stephanie: Um, so if you're still listening, please go to Apple or Spotify or Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating and review, and it helps the show reach more people. And if you're on YouTube, please leave a comment as well, because that helps the algorithm help this [01:42:00] episode reach more people as well.
[01:42:01] Stephanie: Just had to throw in that little pitch 'cause I always forget to do the self-promotion.
[01:42:04] Roisin: I'm definitely gonna go and rate and review straight after this call.
[01:42:07] Stephanie: Oh, thank you. And so on that note, where can people find you?
[01:42:13] Roisin: Well, my Twitter account's just been [01:42:15] hacked, so if you're following me on Twitter, I'm Roisin Michaux, but don't click on any DMs I've sent you because it's not me.
[01:42:20] Roisin: It's some crypto guy trying to steal your information. But apart from that, I have a Substack, and it's peaked.news, so P-A-Key, [01:42:30] P-E-A-K-E-D.news. Uh, and that's, uh, actually links direct to a Substack site where I write, and a weekly newsletter about European gender madness, um, and occasional essays and occasional podcasts.
[01:42:43] Stephanie: Hmm. And, uh, [01:42:45] hopefully your Twitter/X account issue will be resolved by the time this episode comes out. But if it's not, listeners, just use your own judgment. I, I've seen so many people lose their accounts. I wrote a blog post that, in my opinion, didn't get [01:43:00] circulated enough when I first started noticing people losing their accounts to these scams, and it continues.
[01:43:06] Stephanie: Um, so please use your judgment and look at Roisin's recent posts. And as, as I'm looking on the day of our recording, I can see that she hasn't posted [01:43:15] anything from herself in three days. So just use your judgment before clicking on anything.
[01:43:19] Roisin: Yeah. Be careful
[01:43:21] Stephanie: out there. But I, I do hope you have your account back soon, and that people can actually follow you.
[01:43:26] Stephanie: Um, gosh, is there anything that we [01:43:30] Could neatly wrap up that we haven't yet?
[01:43:33] Roisin: No, but I do have an idea for a guest for you, but maybe I can tell you that off-camera. It's, it, it's really important. It's a, it's a subject that's really important. It's in the U- US that's kicking off a lot at the moment. Well, it has been, but [01:43:45] it's kicking off in the UK.
[01:43:46] Roisin: Conversion therapy bans. Um, there's a ger- a Belgian friend of mine who has been, like, he's crimally, being criminally investigated. She's a therapist like you, and she's being criminally investigated for conversion therapy. [01:44:00] Um, and she is actually leaving the country and going to Dubai, so we weren't allowed to talk about it for a very long time, but she's gonna be free to talk about it.
[01:44:07] Roisin: But it's, it, she's quite, she's a very interesting woman, very interesting case study. She's a therapist, and she's been seeing, uh, lots of ROGD kids also, [01:44:15] and I would highly rem- rec- recommend that you talk to her. So if you wish to speak to... I don't know how often you have Europeans on your podcast. You're probably m- uh, mostly, uh- Oh,
[01:44:23] Stephanie: often.
[01:44:23] Stephanie: It's just
[01:44:24] Roisin: they- ... stateside.
[01:44:25] Stephanie: I really appreciate, by the way, you being willing to stay up so late into your evening to talk- Yeah ... with me. [01:44:30] And, uh, it sounds like you should give me your friend's name privately. But, uh, uh, you, you may or may not know this, and listeners may or may not know this 'cause we're 200-something episodes into this podcast, but the whole conversion therapy thing is my pet issue, and it is my claim to fame.
[01:44:44] Stephanie: Right. Like, [01:44:45] this podcast- Oh ... made it into the top 1% of podcasts worldwide partially because I had episode 11 with Helen Joyce, where we did a reverse interview, which a lot of people complain about. They're like, "You should interview her," which I did, like eight- 70 episodes later. But the whole point of having [01:45:00] Helen Joyce on that episode of my podcast was to get her to pull my story out of me because I needed to tell the story of how I faced threats to my counseling license- Oh
[01:45:11] Stephanie: over being accused of conversion therapy. I did not know that. That i- A lot of people don't know [01:45:15] that by now because it's been years. Um- Yeah ... but that is, like, what, uh, initially, like, skyrocketed me into the public eye as a controversial figure, was, like- Wow ... I started blogging and tweeting before I ever released my [01:45:30] podcast, and then a bunch of trans rights activists found me and came after me.
[01:45:34] Stephanie: And then I, like, knew that they were reporting me to my licensing board, so I contacted my licensing board proactively and, like, shared that letter on my blog. And this is what, like, [01:45:45] this is my 15 minutes of fame from, like, 2022. Um, Okay ... so the conversion therapy bans are my pet issue. I'm very, very passionate- Right
[01:45:53] Stephanie: about this issue, and I just discussed this with Diana Lutfi. We do talk about what's going on in states like [01:46:00] Colorado, where, you know, we had the Chiles v. Salazar Supreme Court case, which was a win for free speech. But then Colorado cracked down in the opposite direction by creating this really Orwellian legislation saying that, you know, even families of [01:46:15] deceased, like up to five years after their death, can Sue a therapist for this alleged conversion therapy, which is, is not defined in any meaningful way, um, just completely [01:46:30] subjective.
[01:46:30] Stephanie: Yeah, this is, this is my pet issue. I, um, I get so worked up about it, uh, because it's, it's creating such a, a chilling effect on the field. Like, it's destroying the field of counseling, it's destroying families, the ones who come to me for coaching. I could go on and go
[01:46:44] Roisin: on. You need [01:46:45] to, you need to help the UK therapists then because they've just had their, their draft bill just dropped, and it's a nightmare.
[01:46:50] Roisin: And I can't believe it's even... D- they've gone so far in so many ways, and then this just lands. So, uh, it would be really good to, to... if you can help us f- uh, with the [01:47:00] arguments and, and especially 'cause you're so passionate about it, um, and you know a lot about it. You can, you can talk to us about perhaps- Yeah, you can introduce me- Because we're, we're trying to-
[01:47:07] Roisin: to your
[01:47:07] Stephanie: friend for sure. Go ahead. Sorry ... w-
[01:47:09] Roisin: we're trying to sort of game out messages that will work to help people understand what this [01:47:15] really is. But yeah, a conversation for another day. That's why Helen Joyce interviewed me-
[01:47:17] Stephanie: Mm-hmm ... you know, because of her role-
[01:47:20] Roisin: I'm gonna listen
[01:47:21] Stephanie: to that ... her role in over there.
[01:47:22] Stephanie: Yes. You know, the, this interview was from 2022. Um, and for everyone who complained that she interviewed me again, that was the [01:47:30] plan because I needed to tell this story, and then 70 episodes later, I had her back on and, and we did normal me interview her thing. But, um, yeah, I, I-
[01:47:39] Roisin: Episode 11.
[01:47:40] Stephanie: Episode 11 of my podcast back when I was- Okay, I'm gonna listen to it
[01:47:43] Stephanie: back when I still had, like, bleach blonde hair. [01:47:45]
[01:47:45] Roisin: Oh, really? Okay.
[01:47:48] Stephanie: I look forward to checking it out. That was, that was a crazy idea. See, my hair is, like, almost black. Um- Yeah, so conversion therapy bans, I have a lot to say on that. [01:48:00] Um, it's, it's a mess, and, um, I'm happy to talk to your friend. I have found that, um, testifying in court is really stressful.
[01:48:12] Stephanie: It's
[01:48:12] Roisin: not- Oh, I would hate that.
[01:48:13] Stephanie: Yeah ... not my favorite thing. [01:48:15] But I like talking to people and, um, hel- helping people clarify their thoughts on these things. Um- Yeah ... anyway, okay.
[01:48:24] Roisin: Maybe, yeah. So I guess- Let's, let's, uh, get back to each other on that, 'cause that's- Okay ... yeah, you could help us with that. [01:48:30]
[01:48:30] Stephanie: Yeah, sounds good.
[01:48:31] Stephanie: Brilliant. Um, and I'd love to talk to your friend at some point. Okay. Well, uh, I, I definitely learned something new today. I think, I know our listeners were really appreciative of your last episode and how you explained what's going on with the whole, you know, intersex [01:48:45] activism issue. And, and I feel like this was equally if not more informative and illuminating over something I didn't even know was going on.
[01:48:53] Stephanie: Um, so really appreciate, uh, your work. And, and I look forward to whenever the next time we catch up, I'm sure you'll be [01:49:00] working on something, uh, equally- Yeah ... interesting then as well.
[01:49:02] Roisin: Many, many things, yeah. I'll, I'll keep you posted. Do you
[01:49:05] Stephanie: have a book coming out at some point?
[01:49:07] Roisin: I would love to, but, uh, I don't have time to write it.
[01:49:10] Roisin: But I, I would like to. I, I have, I have, I have a great idea. [01:49:15] I just need to find somebody who will, who will give me money to write it. But there is a WDI. You know the Women's Declaration International? They have made a book on, uh, the TERF resistance around the world, and I wrote the Europe chapter, and that's coming out in- Oh, cool[01:49:30]
[01:49:30] Roisin: yeah. And Vaishnavi, uh, hope I'm pronouncing her name right. She wrote- Vaishnavi Sundar? ... the Asia chapter. Yes. Oh, cool ... to you know. And then, yeah, a bunch of Brit TERFs wrote the UK chapter. And yeah, that's gonna be good. It's coming. It's being launched in Sydney in [01:49:45] September, I think October, so watch out for that.
[01:49:47] Stephanie: Okay. Very cool. Well, Róisín, always so good to see you and connect with you, and thank you so much- Yes ... for coming again on the podcast.
[01:49:56] Roisin: You too, Stephanie. Thanks.
[01:49:59] Stephanie: Thank you for [01:50:00] listening to You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice.
[01:50:12] Stephanie: And of course, please remember, podcasts are not [01:50:15] therapy, and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, [01:50:30] be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair.
[01:50:36] Stephanie: Any resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or [01:50:45] shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrmann, "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful [01:51:00] [01:51:15] [01:51:30] world."