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You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist is a podcast for seekers, dreamers, and questioners that intimately explores the human experience. Your host, Stephanie Winn, distills years of wisdom gained from her practice as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She invites guests from a broad variety of disciplines and many walks of life, including researchers, writers, artists, healers, advocates, inventive outliers, and creative geniuses. Together, they investigate, illuminate, and inspire transformation - in the self, relationships, and society. Curious about many things, Stephanie’s uniquely interdisciplinary psychological lens tackles challenging social issues while encouraging personal and relational wellness. Join this journey through the inner wilderness.
Swell AI Transcript: 127. Anita.mp3
Anita Bartholomew:
You're a kid. You're in first grade. You're there to learn from these teachers. These teachers are going to teach you how to read. They're going to teach you how to add, subtract. They're going to teach you about history. And they're going to teach you about gender. I mean, to a child, this is all one thing. This is, my teacher taught me this. This is what I'm supposed to know. This is real. A child isn't going to look at this and say, well, did what my teacher say today make sense to me?
Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. We're doing something different today. I'm recording in person. I'm here with my good friend, Anita Bartholomew. And I figured since we can actually get together in person and talk, why not? I'm so used to being on video meetings all day. So this is a welcome change of pace. And we also have this whole fancy camera and microphone setup that I'm not used to, so bear with me. Anyway, Anita, it's good to see you. I invited my good friend Anita today because she's been working on a book about indoctrination in the K-12 system and beyond, apparently multiple levels. So I'm excited to hear about Anita's book that's coming out soon. We don't yet have a publishing date, But it's going to be on the way, and she's learned so much from the process of working on this book. So, Anita, welcome. Glad to have you.
Anita Bartholomew: Thank you very much, Stephanie. Great to see you, and thank you for having me on.
Stephanie Winn: All right, so your book is called Sacrificial Lambs. Tell us about it.
Anita Bartholomew: The working title is Sacrificial Lambs, and the publisher is Pitchstone. Uh, they are, I think they're the bravest publishers around. They are also publishing Hannah Barnes's book in the U.S., uh, Time to Think. Yes. And for a small publisher to be able to get the U.S. rights to that was pretty amazing. But the big publishers are all scared.
Stephanie Winn: So I think we've known each other for a little while now and the direction that you've gone with this book has changed shape over time. So tell us about sort of where you started off with this book and then what you discovered along the way and how you decided to focus on this particular issue.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. I became, let's say, obsessed with the indoctrination of children. and beyond because we're all being indoctrinated, right? And I started off just with the entire woke spectrum because looking at the race issue. I mean, I didn't think it was any less racist to be racist against just a new target. And making decisions about a person's character based on his or her supposed sexual identity or ethnicity, or it just seemed like a horrible thing for us to be doing. And so just on a principled level, it affected me deeply. But then I saw what it was doing to people. and how it was harming them. And I became more obsessed. And as you know, I've written for Reader's Digest for like forever. And I suggested, thinking that this would be right up their alley, uh, an article on rapid onset gender dysphoria and neither the U S or the international edition wanted to touch it. And I thought, well, gee, that's strange. Uh, because this is a big story and nobody wanted to touch it. And, uh, so I dug and dug and dug and dug. And I saw that, everything that I was reading in our so-called mainstream media was unicorns and rainbows, everything's wonderful, let's all transition the kids. And the numbers of children who were becoming indoctrinated were rising and the ages of children were dropping. I said, how can this be? Because I knew from, you and from Abigail Shrier's book and from other sources that teen girls were the ones who were seeing this explosion. But now I was talking to parents whose eight year olds, 10 year olds, 11 year olds were claiming that they were suddenly a different sex. And I said, well, These kids, they don't have phones. If they have computers, they're playing games. Where is this coming from? And it's the schools. It's not just, it turns out, trans ideology that they are indoctrinating them into, it is the entire spectrum of queer theory and, but, well, I shouldn't say they're indoctrinating them into the entire spectrum, but the underlying ideology is queer theory. And queer theory, I've heard people say it's Marxism, it's communism, it's none of that. They use the same rhetoric. And so you hear the social justice rhetoric running through all these different ideas. But queer theory basically came out of an essay that Gail Rubin, an academic, Berkeley academic, wrote in the 1980s. And it was basically the idea that anyone with any sexual desires at all should be just embraced. So whether you're a pedophile or you are into German shepherds, whatever the sexual deviance is, it isn't a deviance at all. It's just because our culture says it so. And of course, transsexuals at the time, as they were called, were part of this, but it really is a much bigger thing. It's like embrace all sexual identification, embrace all sexual proclivities. I think the line that sums it up, and of course I'm paraphrasing, is we don't put people in prison for preferring spicy cuisine over blander stuff, right? it went on from there and people just treated it as a social justice issue because she treated it as a social justice issue. So before that we had Foucault and his ideas that, you know, all of this, all the ideas that we have about sexuality are just made up and everything's okay. But when she turned it into a social issue, like these poor boy lovers, she called them, are so persecuted that the line that I recall is the police feast on them. And we are supposed to then feel sorry for these boy lovers, nevermind who they're feasting on. This got to be a very big thing in academia. You know about Judith Butler and her, you know, well, everything's constructed and nothing is real except that we imagine that it's real and everything's okay. And it got wound up into this social justice thing. The post-modernism thing is that Everything's subjective. As humans, we cannot really grasp objective reality. And I'm getting too far into the weeds with this, but the bottom line is this is where it came from. And somehow, when it became a thing in academia, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew, and these kids who took gender studies classes in school, then wound up in various different roles as they graduated. And the leap from academia to everywhere and everything, I still don't understand how normal, rational people accepted this, didn't look at this and say, this is crazy. But somehow, I think, and you've spoken about this quite a bit, everyone wants to be the good people, and this is what the good people were doing.
Stephanie Winn: All right, so, and backing up a moment, I mean, you are coming from the perspective of being like an old school liberal. Oh, yeah. And so you noticed this change over time in the definition and ethos of what was being defined as liberalism or progressivism. It was your investigation of this issue of why doesn't anybody want to acknowledge the 4,000% increase in the number of young people confused about their sex? It was that that led you to really looking at queer theory and the indoctrination going on in the school system and how that if I understand correctly, that you sort of went from looking at how it's starting at these academic institutions of higher education, but then a lot of people going to those institutions end up wanting to become teachers, and then it's in in primary schools, and even younger. And you actually brought some documents with you. We're sitting here together in my living room, so you have your paper printout of documents that we're going to look at. But I think for those who are watching on YouTube, we might pull up the PDF so that people can see what it is that you're looking at. But do you want to go over some of these things that you brought, what you found they're teaching in the public schools? Yeah.
Anita Bartholomew: I really, as we spoke of before, I really couldn't understand how, yes, everything's on the internet, and yes, kids are looking on the internet and they're finding these things and they're saying, oh, well, you know, I'm going to be, but what primed them for this? We know that adults were primed by our major media. because I just, you know, I was just writing from an interview I did a few months ago, a segment of a chapter yesterday about a woman whose son suddenly said, you know, he was having emotional and mental problems and suddenly said, well, I'm a girl. And she and her husband immediately, good liberals, said, well, We listened to NPR. We knew what we were supposed to do because if you don't affirm, then it's very bad for their mental health. They may try to commit suicide. So right away they said, oh yes, your pronouns, we will respect your pronouns. We will respect your new name, everything fine. And at the time the woman was going through chemotherapy, so she wasn't on her game and she wasn't really thinking, wait a minute, Is my kid trans? Is that possible? So we've got the priming from the media of the adults. It's almost impossible to find anything in major media that doesn't say, if you don't agree to this, you're a bigot.
Stephanie Winn: I just, I have to pause on that part where you added, and by the way, she was going through chemotherapy. Yes. Because here I'm thinking about the timing of this issue and with the work that I do, we look at where are the cracks where this got into the family system or to the weaknesses in the young person's psychology and something like, a parent having a near brush with death, sometimes from my family systems theory background, therapists who were thinking holistically in the past, I don't know what's happened to us, but we used to have this sort of training in family systems theory where you would look at why is this symptom or behavior manifesting in this family at this time? Why is this child, the identified patient, having this particular issue, what function does it serve in the family? And when I think about not even knowing anything else about that family, just knowing that the parent was going through chemotherapy, it's almost like there's like a willful defiance in the child that their parent could actually be at risk of death. It's almost like, well, if they if only they need to stick around enough because I'm going through crisis, then maybe they won't die. Like that's my just first initial instinct for how to interpret that behavior. And that's just one of a thousand examples of dynamics that get overlooked with the affirmation model, right? Because you're not supposed to question what could be driving this.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. And we did discuss that because it seemed quite relevant to her and to me because this is the inciting incident, as we say, almost among writers, that's where the story takes off. And for that family, I believe it was the inciting incident, but he had also been exposed to this in the California school systems forever, so he was primed for it. The child was primed, the mother was primed by the media she consumed. And these are good liberals, so naturally they're going to say, oh yes, we know all about this from what we've heard on NPR, she mentioned, and we're going to do everything that we, and you know, she's trying to stay alive, she's trying to hold on to her hair, Um, and the kid, uh, and this is during COVID and she was trying to keep things normal. And one day they were having a conversation. You're saying, well, we're going through a unique moment in time. What is it that you're going to remember about COVID? And he said, breast cancer. So yes, it was probably the inciting incident, but, but the priming comes from. the schools, the priming, and then you take that and yes, the internet is full of it. There's, there are peers who have said, you know, I've, I've done this and I'm happier than I've ever been. Uh, there are predators who come along and they say, well, There was one woman who I spoke to whose daughter, after she was indoctrinated in school and went online and met all these other kids who were calling themselves trans, they are immediately found by predators online. And the men were asking them to send them pictures of their naked breasts. And the older girls would say to them, Well, you're not going to have your breasts anyway. So, you know, why not just make some money from them? So this is, I think that people, when they look at this trans thing, they don't realize that we're talking about sex and we're talking, we're, we're opening up a world of predation here.
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Anita Bartholomew: Let's go to some of the things that we're seeing being taught in school. Yeah, let's take a look. Okay, this is from Portland Public Schools. It's not published by Portland, obviously. This is a national company. They don't have their copyright mark on this, so I don't know which company it is. But there are contractors that are, you know, all over the country. And they provide these documents for teachers to teach the children. First grade. Gender identity is that feeling of knowing your gender. You might feel like you are a boy. You might feel like you are a girl. You might not feel like you're a boy or a girl, but you're a little bit of both.
Stephanie Winn: Well, it's very circular definition. Gender identity is that feeling of knowing your gender. A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. Right, what's a gender? Yeah, it's planting this seed. It's taking gender dysphoria outside of the context of being a psychiatric diagnosis and normalizing this concept that everyone has this thing called a gender identity, and yours could be anything. Really, we have no idea. It could be this, it could be that, it could be the other. It's almost like these are all equally likely outcomes.
Anita Bartholomew: And I think the key word there is normalizing. Because you're a kid. You're in first grade. You're there to learn from these teachers. These teachers going to teach you how to read. They're going to teach you how to add, subtract. They're going to teach you about history. And they're going to teach you about gender. I mean, to a child, this is all one thing. This is, my teacher taught me this. This is what I'm supposed to know. This is real. A child isn't going to look at this and say, well, let me think. Did what my teacher say today make sense to me?
Stephanie Winn: Well, and if something doesn't make sense in school, you feel like it's because you're dumb. And this is an abstract concept. And this is being taught in first grade when kids are still in a concrete stage of reasoning. So concepts like justice, equality, democracy, You know, even I remember the word attitude. Because growing up, I would hear other parents talking about their kids having a bad attitude or something like that. And I didn't understand what the word attitude meant, right? Because it is an abstract concept that sums up a bunch of subtle things that some people pick up on better than others. So this is a really abstract concept. The idea that you could feel like a boy or a girl in a way that's distinct from what you physically are, what you always have been and always will be. And I think this has the effect of gaslighting children because the fact that they're not getting it is going to make most of them feel like there's something wrong with them for not getting it. Then it's going to send them on this wild goose chase of, well, I have to know what my gender identity is. What's my gender identity? Am I this? Am I that? It sets off this neurotic, obsessive, compulsive thought loop about worrying about something that you shouldn't be worrying about in the first place. In fact, Anxiety and depression are synonymous with an excessive focus inward on the self. This is an age when children are not supposed to be self-conscious. And that's the beauty of, I mean, we're talking first grade, so six and seven year olds, right? That's the beauty of that age is that they're unselfconscious and this sort of forces them to become self-conscious, navel gazing, looking within themselves for this abstract concept. It's a setup for neurosis.
Anita Bartholomew: All right. So this is a teacher's guide, the teacher's guide for kindergartners in Portland schools. And it starts off saying, it is up to the teacher to determine the amount and detail of information to share with their students in ways that are age appropriate. Kindergarten.
Stephanie Winn: So we trust the teacher's judgment on this, just not the parents.
Anita Bartholomew: And the teacher's guide tells them what the vulva is, vagina, and the vagina is a canal leading from the vulva to the uterus, blah, blah, blah. The vagina has great elasticity and can adjust to the size of a penis. In a kindergarten teacher's teaching guide, she's told, well, you can decide what's age appropriate. How is this age appropriate? in any way? Why are you leaving this to a kindergarten teacher to decide that a child of five or six, maybe, should be hearing that the vagina can adjust to the size of a penis?
Stephanie Winn: I mean, when I think kindergarten, I think the head, shoulders, knees, and toes song. And the leg bones connected to the hip bone song. which my fiance has pointed out is not an anatomically correct description of all the bones of the body, by the way, in case you were thinking. But, you know, kindergarten is an age when we're learning the names of the most basic, obvious body parts. Right? I don't think it's an age at which children understand that we have inner organs. I think it wasn't until middle school that I remember learning about all the different parts of the digestive tract, OK? But we're taking four and five-year-olds and making sure that they know the names and functions of all genitalia. And we're deciding that individual teachers can decide if they want to share this information with students, but it's not up to parents to decide. What makes it the teacher's job to make these kind of personal decisions for families?
Anita Bartholomew: And I want to point out that I was just interviewing a mother and her daughter last, yesterday afternoon. She was in seventh grade and the teacher, pulled up pictures supposedly for a sex ed class on the internet. She Googled vaginas and penises and had a projector and had the, the girl said very explicit, because you know, from the internet you get anything.
Stephanie Winn: So pornography basically.
Anita Bartholomew: Right, right. Had them up on this projector screen and then told the children to sketch them.
Stephanie Winn: It's obsessive. And this used to be a crime, right? Like showing pornography to children was a crime. I feel like yesterday, like what happened? When did that become standard practice?
Anita Bartholomew: And so the girl who is now in her first year of college just now is involved in a very nice relationship, but that scared her. She did not want to have anything to do with boys. And she had to go into counseling. Now this is seventh grade. Seventh grade. Can you imagine exposing little children?
Stephanie Winn: So we have a seventh grader. He's disgusted by kissing. He, you know, if we kiss each other while he's in the same room, he goes, ew, stop, you know? Like that's appropriate for seventh graders. And we're cherishing every moment of it. We're like, yep, that's a seventh grade reaction right there, you know? We're enjoying it while it lasts, the innocence of being disgusted by kissing. And I remember, I mean, when I was still a therapist to children, I remember a girl around that age who had accidentally seen some images like that and needed therapy for it. So making children explicitly focus on something where the gut instinct is to say, I'm not ready for that. And what I remember about seventh grade is, yeah, some kids are starting to have crushes. Some kids have crushes earlier than others. Some kids have innocent crushes when they're prepubescent. Some kids don't start having crushes until after puberty. But there's an innocence to crushes. At that age, you're not linking those little butterflies that you get or the way that you want to stare at someone. You're not linking that innocent feeling, the beginning stages of adolescent limerence. You're not linking that with these gross, personal images and explicit sexual thoughts. And I feel like, what is this doing? Not only is it traumatizing children and is it sexually inappropriate, but what is it doing to the development of romantic feelings? Because all these kids are now identifying as asexual. Now, I think partly over-prescribing of antidepressants and birth control has something to do with that. If you don't know about this, listen to my episode with Taylor Murphy. But like, what is it doing to uh, you know, all of this exposure, what is it doing to just the innocent, normal feelings of being drawn to someone? Cause I think it's scaring kids and then being like, I'm not a sexual being. Ah. Yeah.
Anita Bartholomew: Well, sure. I mean, little kids are little kids. They are not sexual beings and we're imposing sexuality, not we personally, but, but the schools are imposing this and they, they back up this idea that this is good for them with, with, uh, studies that are really poorly done. And there's one meta-analysis that I mentioned earlier where, you know, they talk about 30 years of comprehensive sexual education prove that this is good for kids. Well, no. It doesn't, you know, first of all, we don't even know what they mean by comprehensive sexual education because if you mandate sexual education in kindergarten and you say it should tell children what proper names for body parts are, that can, someone takes that and goes in any direction with it. Let me show you one of the directions they've gone.
Stephanie Winn: Alright, we're about to find out. What direction are they going with this?
Anita Bartholomew: Okay. This again is Portland Public Schools kindergarten. And we no longer call boys and girls, boys and girls, because we don't want to offend our kindergartners who might be non-binary or trans, right? So a girl is now a person with a vulva.
Stephanie Winn: Right. That's not degrading or humiliating in any way.
Anita Bartholomew: A boy is a person with a penis. This is what a kindergartner sees, and they also have the same images for them in first grade.
Stephanie Winn: It's so very reductionistic. I mean, on the one hand, it's the gender activists who like to accuse those of us who object to this ideology of being obsessed with genitals, obsessed with what's in people's pants. That's obviously a projection and an inversion because they're the ones who are obsessed with genitalia. They're obsessed with changing what's in people's pants and modifying it. But this basically breaks down what it is to be male or female to exclusively a person's genitals and makes that the defining characteristic. The truth is that while your genitalia are a pretty good indicator of your chromosomes and fundamentally your sex, which all boils down to if you have to define sex in the rare people for whom everything doesn't match up, it basically comes down to which type of gamete is your body organized around the production of. But beyond that, for males, it's every cell of their body. It's so many systems of their body and the brain that align with their male sex. And the same for females. The gender activists like to say that, oh, well, I have the brain of this type of person in this type of body. That's not true. That's been debunked. Leonard Sachs has done great work on this, by the way. So read Why Gender Matters if you want to understand why that's incorrect. But it basically says there's no such thing as boy and girl. There's only person with a penis and person with a vagina or, excuse me, vulva, which places so much emphasis on the person's genitalia. And it's so reductionistic and insulting and humiliating and degrading. denies children the opportunity to understand what makes them truly a boy or a girl.
Anita Bartholomew: Well, but of course then there are no boys and girls according to this lesson plan because you can, again, and going back to that first document, you can feel like a boy, but you might not be a boy. You can feel like a girl. You might feel like a little of both or neither. So these are all options that are given to children, but how can a child possibly comprehend what all this is about. You're just, you're injecting confusion. You're sexualizing a child at the same time you're totally confusing a child about what sex even is.
Stephanie Winn: And by the way, this person with the penis thing has circumcised and uncircumcised. And can you imagine, what grade is this one for again?
Anita Bartholomew: This is for kindergarten and first grade.
Stephanie Winn: Okay, so imagine that a little kindergartner boy who's uncircumcised is like, what's that? What's circumcised? Okay, so now someone has to explain. We'll see when some little boys are babies, they have a part of their genitalia chopped off. I mean, that's just opening up a whole nother can of worms here.
Anita Bartholomew: Like, really? And the interesting thing is, if you look at these images, you really can't tell from the images which one's circumcised and which one isn't anyway, because, you know, they're kind of cartoonish. So you're injecting these ideas without really offering any meaningful or useful information at all. This is not something that a child of six or seven or younger needs to know.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, why does a boy that age need to be able to tell the difference between a circumcised and an uncircumcised penis?
Anita Bartholomew: Oh, why does a girl for that matter? Because, you know. But of course, again, there are no boys and girls, right? So now we get into second grade. And in the second grade, it's not enough just to be a person with a penis. We've got the spread eagle. kid.
Stephanie Winn: This is so pornographic.
Anita Bartholomew: It really is, isn't it? I mean, this is second grade.
Stephanie Winn: Because this is a person. In this image, this is a person spreading their legs like, look at my genitals, world.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah, but it's a person with a penis, it's not a boy, because there are no such things, right, anymore, unless you've identified as one. Now, this is the person with a vulva. The person with a vulva, you've got the same image that a gynecologist would have if the kid was in stirrups. And you've got all the body parts labeled. You've got clitoris, vulva, opening to the urethra, opening to the vagina, anus. But still, that's not enough. That's not enough. They've got to learn these vocabulary words in second grade. Now, I recall my son in second grade learning words like mommy, daddy, school, dog, cat. These kids have to learn clitoris, urethra, vulva. But because they want to make sure that these lessons stay, they give them sticky notes. And there's another version of this without the labels. The kids have to put the sticky notes on this gynecological exam.
Stephanie Winn: And again, this is before we know where the stomach is in relation to the liver. Can I pause and ask you here, what have you discovered in your investigations about the rationale for making it not only that this material is taught at such a young age, but that it is now viewed as the job of the teachers and the public school system as opposed to the job of the parents. Because there are lots of other things that we leave to the parents, OK, from how to brush your teeth and tie your shoelaces to later in life. There are so many basic skills that kids are not taught in school. that are not considered the purview of academia, that if parents don't attend to them learning those things, they they have a really harsh entry into adulthood. I'm thinking about everything from laundry to taxes to rental agreements. So I'm somebody who's always thinking about how the school system does not teach information that students need to know that will help them be confident and competent in the real world. So given that There's no expectation that the school system teach a human being literally every single thing they need to know because we understand that there are parents and other relatives and other life experiences to be had. How was the decision made to make this particular thing? a school curriculum issue at all, as opposed to something that every family can teach their child at home?
Anita Bartholomew: All right. That is a very good question. And the answer is, it is all labeled anti-bullying. This is called anti-bullying, anti-violence. It's under, it's if you know your body parts, then you'll know not to have, know that people shouldn't touch those without your permission. It's so that you, it's the gender stuff is so that you won't bully children. And they've done a very good job apparently of convincing kids that, You know, it's perfectly normal to be lesbian, gay, bi, or trans. But they're really not interested in lesbian, gay, and bi. They're interested in trans. And so they call it anti-bullying. And it's mandated in many school systems under anti-bullying lessons. And it's just insane. It has been shown, according to the research, to make kids more accepting of LGBT. But you know what they're not as accepting of? Plain old straight people. They don't want to be straight because this is also presented as a social justice issue. So if you are just a plain vanilla little white girl Well, sorry, you're a Karen. You're a danger to everybody who is a different ethnicity or a different sexuality. So none of the kids want to be that white cis kid. And they especially don't want to be the white cis boy, because then on top of all the other things that you are, you're automatically an oppressor, you are toxic. You have toxic masculinity.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah. So I'm thinking about the phrase swimsuit areas or bathing suit areas, right? And it's like, well, that's all you need to know in terms of places not to touch or be touched when you are a child. And those are places that as long as you understand what parts of a person's body are supposed to be covered by a swimsuit, that also defines what can be taught at home. The idea that this is called anti-bullying is extra ironic in that context because it Are children flashing their body parts under their swimsuit areas at school? I mean, this idea that you have to show kids pictures of what swimsuit area body parts look like so they won't be bullied. So who is showing those private parts to each other? Because it seems like the issue isn't that kids know what each other's private parts look like. And the issue is, do you know that that is a normal variation of that body part and you shouldn't make fun of someone for having that normal variation on that body part? No, that's not the issue. The issue should be if anybody is showing that body part to anybody else, we have a bigger problem.
Anita Bartholomew: But of course it's the teachers who are showing the body parts. in very graphic images. And when you raise the issue of, well, parents should be doing this and not teachers, that's another big issue in the schools. Parents are being treated like the enemy, like the scary people. And from very early on, kids are told, for instance, I'll just tell you about this child in the Olympia School District. Her teacher was very much an activist. And of course, they learn all the things there that they learned that might have been different materials. But basically, this is it. If you're in a progressive school system, you should know that if they're telling you your child is getting comprehensive sexuality education, because they don't call it sex ed, they call it sexuality ed in Portland, There's a good chance it's something like this. We don't necessarily have the same documents, curriculum materials, but there's a good chance that some of this is going to be part of it. So the kids are told if one of these, their classmates, comes out, you must not tell anybody, and especially not parents. So right away, you're setting up the parent as the enemy, as the unsafe person. So this little girl in the Olympia School District was taken under the wing of her teacher, who was very much an activist. And the teacher pretty much convinced the kid that she was trans, 10 years old, fifth grader, I think. I think she was fifth grade, 10 years old. And the kid was, you know, she took on a new name and new pronouns, and the entire class was instructed We cannot, under any circumstances, have any of your parents know this, because if they know it, they'll tell her parents. So now all the parents are the enemy. And eventually, the whole indoctrination came out, and the mother confronted the teacher, and the principal and guidance counselor backed up the teacher and said, well, she did nothing wrong. You know, and the, the entire school was told that they had the, the staffers were told that they had to maintain this fiction that the child was a boy. And one teacher, a male teacher stood up and said, Hey, you know, this is not right. We shouldn't be doing this. We shouldn't be keeping this from the parents. And he was told, well, get with the program or you could be fired. This, this is what's going on. And you know, the woman I spoke about earlier with her boy who came home and out of the blue said he was trans when she was having chemotherapy. Even when we spoke, she didn't know. that he had been exposed to all this in school, and even if she had heard it, again, good liberal, right? I'm a good liberal. You know, if someone had told me and I hadn't looked into this, oh, it's comprehensive sex ed, and they're going to make sure that everyone is respected and that, you know, people are not homophobic, I would have said, oh, okay. Devil in the details, right? So it's quite awful what they're doing and they're doing it believing that this is what the good people do. This is, this is, you know, this is teaching kids what they need to know. And this might not even be the worst stuff I've seen.
Stephanie Winn: So the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Um, and that, that begs the question, what is the worst stuff you've seen in your investigation so far, Anita? Oh, yes. The diagram of a thousand genitals.
Anita Bartholomew: Yes. Intersects supposedly male and female genitals. This is fourth grade in the Olympia school system. But what's important is that this is a document, curriculum materials, that are presented by Teen Council of Planned Parenthood. Ah. Now, what I didn't know, and I learned while researching this, is that Planned Parenthood is one of the top, if not the top, publishers of sexual education materials for K through 12.
Stephanie Winn: Why does that not surprise me? That actually explains a lot.
Anita Bartholomew: And so Planned Parenthood got very, very into the gender business right around 2011, 2012, because with the Affordable Care Act, we had pre-birth control. And so Planned Parenthood lost out on a lot of their abortion clinic revenue. Suddenly, yes, abortions dropped. because birth control was available. And their revenue went down, but then it went up again. They got very involved in gender clinics. They went from just a few that offered hormones to now they're the second largest, I believe, provider of hormones, cross-sex hormones in the country.
Stephanie Winn: I have to ask Anita if you have seen that clip that's gone around the internet revealing the the the fact that Planned Parenthood sells tissues from aborted fetuses.
Anita Bartholomew: Oh, I didn't see that.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, there's there's a sort of a leaked clip of some people who work at Planned Parenthood basically talking about how When they do abortions, they try to preserve certain tissues from the fetuses as much as possible because those tissues are worth a lot of money. And so I'll tell you where my mind goes with this. I wonder what's being done with all the healthy breast tissues that are being removed from young girls. If you think about, prior to the era of young girls having radical elective double mastectomy is also known as breast amputation or colloquially. colloquially known as top surgery. Prior to this era, the only breast tissue anyone was having removed was diseased tissue from women with cancer. or maybe the occasional breast reduction tissue, which I presume wouldn't remove healthy mammary glands, but would only remove fat, I would think. I mean, I don't actually know the details of breast reduction surgery. That's not something I've really looked into. But now, there's a huge supply of the tissues of actually what would be the optimal tissue. If you were someone in the medical industrial complex who wanted healthy breast tissue, you couldn't get anything more ideal than the tissue of girls who had just made it through puberty, right? This is the healthiest breast tissue in the world. And it includes mammary glands. So that's where my mind goes with it. What the hell are they doing? If there's so much of the supply, is there a demand for it? We already know that the tissues of aborted fetuses are worth a lot of money, and this is part of how Planned Parenthood makes their money. So what the hell are they doing with girls' breast tissue? I know you weren't planning to go there. I know, but it's awful. This is me with my tinfoil hat on going,
Anita Bartholomew: The amazing thing is that so many of these organizations that As a good liberal, I have always looked up to and thought, well, they really, they're necessary, they're helpful. Planned Parenthood was the go-to for women who didn't have health insurance just to get their annual cervical exam and mammograms. And so they served, aside from abortion and birth control, a really important need. And I thought, likewise, the ACLU, all these organizations, these nonprofits that we thought of as really doing good work, have gotten on the trans train. And I'm sorry, I consider what they're doing to be evil. Oh, I do too. But yeah, back to this, if we put up the… Sorry. When we put up the PDF of this on the screen, you'll be able to see it better. But there is an image here of, I think, about 15 or so of women's pubic areas and an equal number of male. And then we have the intersex. And if you can see it, one of these is with the woman's pubic hair shaved into the shape of a cat's face. Tell me what a fourth grader needs that you can find on this page. Can I take a look at that? Because these are fourth graders. This was supposed to be a puberty lesson. This is not a puberty lesson. This is simply sexualizing children.
Stephanie Winn: OK, I have to say from my own experiences of once upon a time having been a fourth grade girl and my experience of having known fourth grade girls, that fourth grade girls are peak cat lovers, OK? Nobody loves cats more than fourth grade girls, OK? And they will read novels about cats. They will want all the cats. Fourth grade girls love their kitty cats. And so is it a coincidence that they have a cat genital thing, right? And in the world of the bizarre intersection, by the way, Anita, have you come across much about furries? Oh, yes. Oh, well, then we have to get into that. I need to know what you've learned. I know in the bizarre world of furries, first of all, that there's a lot of crossing of boundaries and inappropriate behavior between adults and children, and it's the perfect cover for predators. But this whole uwu thing that they do, that's like uwu is supposed to have some association with cats and being cute, but also being sexualized. So yeah, it's not coincidental. They targeted fourth grade girls, the world's greatest cat lovers, and are trying to make them see some connection between their love of cats, which is an innocent, age-appropriate obsession, and their this manufactured interest in genitals, which no fourth grader is naturally that interested in unless they've been groomed.
Anita Bartholomew: And, and there are a couple of these where the pubic hair is shaved into a heart shape.
Stephanie Winn: Another thing that kids like to draw. I mean, come on.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. So this is the, you know, here's one and there's another one on the other page, but, And in addition, the one thing, they did have one page on actual puberty, but among the things that they said would be helpful during puberty, in addition to deodorants and maybe menstrual cups and menstrual pads, puberty blockers.
Stephanie Winn: Oh, we have to get into that. Hold on. I'm forming more and more of a mental list. So we need to come back to furries. I'm still looking at this. I want to come back to puberty blockers. I'm still noticing on this page that, okay, so this is for fourth graders. The only kids with any pubic hair in fourth grade are the ones with precocious puberty. And all of these, have some amount of pubic hair, except for maybe one or two, and it has almost always been shaved in some way, right? So this is 100% adult. This is adults with adult amounts of pubic hair and who are also engaging in some degree of pubic hair grooming. I just had to notice that. Another thing that really stands out to me here is this examples of intersex variation thing. Everything I have seen on the sex ed that's being taught to kids now makes it sound like, just like you were saying earlier, Anita, that it's sort of equally likely you might be gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, any of these things. They lump them all together. Well, they also make it seem like you are Just as in the same way that you're also likely to discover that you're a boy inside, discover you're a girl inside, discover you're something else, there's also this myth about intersex, that you might be intersex, right? That you could be a boy, you could be girl, you could be intersex, you could be mostly male, mostly female. The actual low prevalence rates of people actually having genitalia like the ones shown here is not discussed and it, it makes it look like a spectrum. If you look at these four in a row, as if, you know, on one end you have a more normal looking vulva on the other end, you have, you have a penis and scrotum, but it still has this like slit in it that makes it, and it makes it look like there's a spectrum running from a vulva on the one hand to a penis and scrotum on the other, where I mean, yeah, it says intersex, so I guess maybe these are… I haven't actually studied the genitalia of people with intersex, but this in juxtaposition… Well, obviously you're not in fourth grade. In comparison to everything else, this makes it seem like you are equally likely to have any combination of genital features.
Anita Bartholomew: Well, that is actually one of the ways they get to introduce this. They claim that 2% of people are intersex. Now they're including in that polycystic ovary syndrome. They're including everything in it.
Stephanie Winn: And Leonard Sachs, I have to add, Leonard Sachs has debunked those figures.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah, it was like 0.0018%, something like that. But this normalizes the idea that nobody knows what sex anybody is, that genitals can be any way and no way, and that, you know, and that, yeah, you can change things.
Stephanie Winn: And you know, it also, it paves the way for people whose genitals are altered by so-called gender-affirming care. Because if a boy is put on puberty blockers, he's going to have a micropenis. And his scrotum may not develop to the normal shape. If a girl takes testosterone, her clitoris will grow into something resembling a micropenis. So this normalization of so-called intersex genitalia is sort of part of how they set you up for expecting more and more people to be impacted by these drugs.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. And I think, um, it might be on that page. It might not be, might be on a different page, but it, the, the message is, you know, whatever genitals you have a right for you and it's okay. And they don't have to look like other people's, but that's not the real message. The real message is we want you involved in this sexualization. We want you to be obsessed with genitals. Yeah. We want you obsessed and confused. And this is going on, I mean, these are very large companies. They're, um, uh, the Planned Parenthood is one, Secus, Amaze. There, there are a number of, you know, I don't have the list on the top of my head. There are a number of companies, not this bad, but there are a number of companies that under the guise of doing all sorts of good things for kids are, sexualizing them. And you have to wonder, I mean, the teachers who were teaching this, well, this was actually presented by teen council in this case. They came into the school and they gave this presentation, Teen Council of Planned Parenthood. I was unable to get the documents that were presented in Portland because I was told that they were an outside vendors and they couldn't give them to me as part of my freedom of information request. But you can just assume that this is going on. If you're in a liberal or a progressive school district and you don't know what's happening in your kid's sex ed class, you should find out.
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Anita Bartholomew: Yeah, this is a lesson for fifth graders. Again, this is from a Portland Public Records request. And children are given learning targets for what they need to learn in sex ed. I can define sex assigned at birth, gender identity, cisgender, transgender, gender non-binary. I can differentiate between gender identity and gender expression. I can describe two gender role stereotypes and how they may have an impact on people who are not cisgender. I can contribute to a culture of inclusivity, curiosity, and respect. And I think that last line is the most important here, because really what they're trying to do is inculcate an idea in children that this is, you know, this is good. This is, you know, I am contributing. I am a good person. I know all this stuff. I know who's trans. I know who's cis. I know who's non-binary. And this is what makes it so insidious that to be a good person, you need to know and accept and embrace all this.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, I think I'm especially mad at point number three. I can describe two gender role stereotypes and how they may have an impact on people who are not cisgender. It's back to that whole privilege and oppression, the drama triangle, victim rescuer, persecutor issue that I like to speak of, because it frames the whole matter of gender role stereotypes based on how they impact, quote, people who are not cisgender. So it's the cisgender people. quote, cisgender people here who supposedly A, fit those gender role stereotypes and, and, you know, and benefit from them. Right. So it's basically, taking all gender atypicality, that's another Leonard Sachs term, it's much more neutral. I like the term gender atypicality over gender nonconformity, because as Leonard Sachs points out, atypical versus typical is sort of values neutral, whereas conformity versus nonconformity, like, well, who wants to be a conformist? That's just boring. That's just, you're not thinking for yourself. You're not an individual. So this is basically saying, that if you don't fit the stereotypes, in other words, if you're atypical, then that equates to being so-called not cisgender, right? It's not that you can be someone who doesn't fit the stereotypes and and not identify as trans or non-binary, right? Like it just forces people into a corner here. And then again, all these abstract concepts about identity, matters of identity and looking for something within yourself for kids who are just barely entering the developmental stage of being able to grasp things that are abstract in the first place.
Anita Bartholomew: You raised something about the atypicality and there is, you might've seen it, there's this organization, sorry, in the UK called Mermaids and they created this diagram where there's G.I. Joe on one side and Barbie on the other. And then they have all these intermediate genders. And if you're not Barbie or G.I. Joe, you're an intermediate gender.
Stephanie Winn: And you know my favorite diagram making fun of that is the sex spectrum made by Cynthia Breheny and Zach Elliott of the Paradox Institute, the sex spectrum from sperm to egg. Have you seen that one? Oh, I haven't seen that one. It goes sperm, sperg, spag, egg. And it has like, yeah, these things that look like between sperm and egg, sort of like the intersex. cartoon over there.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah, this whole thing with the intersex thing, too, is just so, again, it's indoctrinating children into being confused what sex is, what sex they are, and if it's just a big muddle anyway, then why not change sex, you know? And I've heard from people who have since detransitioned, and I'm sure you've heard from many more, That it just sometimes, well there was one woman in particular who said it just seemed like it would be easier to be a man.
Stephanie Winn: or asexual, right? Who can blame these kids who are like, I don't want any part of this? It's being shoved down their throats. It's robbing them of the innocence of. And I just keep thinking back to having my first crushes in middle school and how innocent it was. And if I had this stuff shoved down my throat all day, every day in school, I would probably be so grossed out and afraid of everything.
Anita Bartholomew: And you talk about having it shoved down your throat. In many schools, it literally is. In the Chicago school system for Pride Month, the teachers dressed up in gender unicorn costumes and they greeted kids as they walked in the door and they made a video and one guy was, you know, I want to give a shout out to all my, you know, trans and bi and all my best sexuals. And I'm thinking, my best sexuals, you're talking to children. What are you saying to these children that everything is about sex? These are elementary school kids. Why are we doing this to children and why do parents not even know about it? Because they don't, a lot of the parents that I've spoken to just have no idea where this concept originally was introduced to their children. And some of them, because I've been doing this for, you know, well over a year, when we first spoke I couldn't tell them either and that's when I went looking, you know, where is this coming from? because these kids weren't even old enough to be on the internet yet, most of them, the younger ones. Yeah, it's insane not only that this is happening but that so many teachers, and I think most teachers really care about the kids they're teaching and they want to do what's right for them. Why are they not looking at this and saying, you've got to be kidding me?
Stephanie Winn: I think a lot of them got into teaching because of their strong activist bent. And, um, you know, we tend to associate activism with altruism, but activism is actually associated with certain dark triad personality traits. So tell us what you discovered about puberty blockers in your research.
Anita Bartholomew: Oh, yes. The puberty blockers are actually being promoted to children. Do you have something on this?
Stephanie Winn: Yeah.
Anita Bartholomew: All right. So in fifth grade, which is probably about the time that kids would be asking for puberty blockers. They learned that puberty blockers stop estrogen and testosterone, stop body changes of puberty but can't undo changes that have already happened, start taking hormones of the sex that matches their gender identity and young person needs to talk to parent, caregiver, guardian, and medical professional before starting. But what they're saying is, here's something you can do, kids. You can take puberty blockers, you can stop puberty, and then you can start taking hormones of the sex that matches your gender identity.
Stephanie Winn: Well, and to be fair, we just went over this sheet with all these drawings of genitalia and that was fourth grade, right? Hmm. Okay. So let's get this straight in fourth grade, they're shown all of these pictures of hairy genitals. Okay. And it's gross. Like even for a mature adult sexual being, nobody wants to look at this, right? It's only like sick twisted weirdos that want to stare at drawings of different kinds of genitals all day. Like this is not a normal person's interest. So first they shove this down their throats in fourth grade. And as I pointed out, as we were looking at it, I was like, none of these are what genitals would look like on a fourth grader, because these are all people who've gone through puberty. They're all people who have some kind of hair around their genitalia.
Anita Bartholomew: This is a different school district, by the way, but it's the same idea.
Stephanie Winn: But I mean, let's look at it this way. I think it's safe enough to assume that in some schools, this is the order of the curriculum, that before they get to fifth grade, they're shown pictures of post-pubescent genitalia. And it's like the natural response is like, ew. If I have that response as an adult, I'm like, I don't want to look at this. So of course, a kid is going to be grossed out, horrified, and disgusted. They're made to feel like puberty is this terrifying thing. They're already having all this stuff shoved down their throat. They're thinking like, ew, I don't want to get hairy. To your point, here's something you can do about it. You can take puberty blockers. You don't have to go through this. You don't have to become a hairy, disgusting set of genitals for the whole world to look at.
Anita Bartholomew: Right. And in this same presentation, the fourth grade presentation, there was a page, which I believe I sent you in a PDF, but I don't have it here, where it's a page of things that would be helpful in puberty. And of course there are the Tampax and the sanitary napkins and the deodorant and jockstrap and what have you, and puberty blockers. These are gonna be helpful to you in puberty. But when you look at all this, and again, we're horrified by the idea that people are priming children for these chemicals that do awful things to them. Puberty blockers don't just arrest the obvious signs of puberty. They have an effect on brain development. These kids are never going to be anything but kids at some level, perhaps. We don't really know. We don't know what we're doing to these children. And these ideas, they're presented by these non-medical people. They're teachers. They're fourth grade teachers. Oh, perfectly reversible. You know? And so we're horrified if we're sane people, I think, by the idea of mutilating children either with chemicals or with surgery. making them lifelong patients. But the thing that hasn't really come out as much in other publications and what I was just shocked to find is this rampant sexualization. They are priming these kids for sex. They are priming them for sex when they're children. And when you look back at Gail Rubin's Thinking Sex, the essay I spoke of earlier, About 50% of it is a defense of pedophilia and everything else, you know, bestiality and incest and what have you. These are just all different tastes in sex and we shouldn't condemn people for having different tastes. And you can read that. I read it at first, when I first came across it, I thought, well, okay, this is an academic. She doesn't know what she's talking about, really. She doesn't understand. the depth of risk to children. But I didn't really believe that it was actually being applied. But when you see stuff like this, you say, well, somebody knows what this is doing to children. Maybe the teachers who are teaching it don't know. But somebody wrote this stuff. Somebody illustrated this stuff. Somebody published this stuff. Someone is pushing it into schools around the country. Somebody knows what the objective is. And the objective isn't anti-bullying. And I'm sorry for being so completely a downer on all this, but… No, we need to be downers about it.
Stephanie Winn: It's really concerning. I mean, it's a well-established fact that pedophiles are drawn to professions where they have access to children?
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. I would not, you know, I know that there was a recent case, wasn't there, of a Portland teacher who was soliciting sex. with someone he thought was 13 and now they're looking to see if there are other victims. I mean, yeah, whether it's teachers who are being drawn to the profession because they have these proclivities or whether they're, you know, it's just a very innocent, uh, on the part of teachers just doing what they're told, here's the material, teach it, and there's somebody else waiting in the wings. Whatever it is, I mean, I don't really understand how we connect from teaching all this to children to the perverts who are waiting for those kids. And I'm not about to make a prediction about how this happened, but I do know that these perverts are waiting. They are on the internet and they are searching for kids who are identifying as trans and they're asking them for images of themselves naked. They're asking them to meet with them. They're engaging in sexual conversations on the web with them.
Stephanie Winn: And those images can be used to blackmail them.
Anita Bartholomew: Yes. Yes. And have been.
Stephanie Winn: And it takes a long time and potentially a lot of the right type of therapy for a victim of childhood sexual abuse to realize that they were innocent. I haven't spoken much on this podcast, although I share a little bit in the course, ROGD Repair, about my personal background, but I was groomed by my guitar teacher when I was 14. And it took me years to realize he knew exactly what he was doing, Um, I was far from his first or last victim. That, that one took me a long time because they do the grooming. Oh, you're so special. You know, like you're so mature. I thought you were 16 as if that would make a difference. Right. Um, you know, that it took me years to realize what had actually happened. And by then it was, you know, long past the time that I could have done anything. And if I could go back in time, I would have given myself a message, of course, report it to the police and, you know, potentially save God knows how many other victims. But that's coming from me, you know, a pretty intelligent person who's, you know, a therapist myself, and a lot of people, are even less fortunate. They carry that guilt with them for the rest of their lives. They're tricked into thinking that it was their idea. And what this does is this kind of imagery and this obsessive education plants this seed. It's almost like, I guess part of what comes to mind is like the grain of sand causing the pearl. That Kids have an instinct to be disgusted by this type of content because it's not right for them. They're not at the age where they need this information, and they definitely don't need it in this form. So the instinct is to want to push it away, but I think that because they can't, because it's being shoved down their throats constantly, that there's like… maybe like a bit of like a Stockholm syndrome that develops around it where there's like, they kind of go with it. And some maybe develop an obsession with this as much as they wish on some level that they could get away from it. Does that make sense?
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. Well, I can tell you that this is something I've never actually said before in public, but yes, I had an experience as a child. And I told no one about it until I was probably about 30 because I felt guilty. Right. A child. And I was too young to know what sex was at that time, but I was sure that it was my fault.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah. Yeah. And you carry around all kinds of feelings about that kind of stuff.
Anita Bartholomew: And to think that this is happening It's rampant. All these children are being exposed to this. And then you wonder why kids are calling themselves asexual? No, I'm not wondering at all. You know, this is traumatizing.
Stephanie Winn: So puberty blockers are promoted as a solution.
Anita Bartholomew: To puberty. And then, you know, I thought about this and it's like, what better for a pedophile than to have someone who is of age. and yet has the body of a child.
Stephanie Winn: Beth Dombkowski Yep. So, shall we talk about furries? What have you learned about furries?
Anita Bartholomew: Susan Axelrod I actually haven't looked into furries that much, but I'm aware of the furries. It ties into a lot of these role-playing things that happen on the internet. And role-playing seems so innocent, doesn't it? You know, I mean, every child is a role player. Every child plays make believe. When my son was little, every day he had a different costume. He was a football player, he was a baseball player, he was a cowboy, he was an Indian. This is what kids love to do. They love to dress up. And so these role playing games have been turned into sexual games. And again, I haven't looked that deeply into the furries. I do know that there is a sexual element to it with adults. There is- And with children. Yes. Children and adults. The anime cartoons again as well. Kids love cartoons. and there is anime porn, there's cartoon porn the kids are involved in, and it's very often this gender shifting so that you don't really know whether you're looking at a male or a female. It's just these children are being targeted in so many ways, in so many places, and it's amazing to me that there are that many adults doing it and there are that many parents who are clueless about it.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, and parents taking their kids to anime conventions and furry meetups. Furry con, yeah. Furry, you know, I've learned about the furry community, both from detransitioners who were groomed and abused at those conventions, as well as from the parents of trans-identified adults who know that their kids are involved in some really, really dark stuff. happens at anime and furry conventions. So group sex orgies with narcotics like fentanyl and ketamine and people dressed up as furries. So people are having sex with people they don't know. And it's the perfect way for predators to disguise themselves and you know, basically for adults to have sex with children and pretend that they didn't know. I mean, there's all kinds of dark stuff going on there.
Anita Bartholomew: And, you know, we're allowing this into our culture thinking that we're being accepting and we're good people and we're not putting anybody down and we're not shaming people. And you've probably seen that Planned Parenthood meme, don't yuck their yum. I feel a lot of yuck about that. But where we as adults are being, in a sense, groomed, primed, whatever, to be so accepting of all these ideas that we knew to be desensitized to it. They crossed a line that should not be crossed.
Stephanie Winn: It's like the worst thing in the world that you could be is closed-minded. And so what does that say about our capacity for discernment, our capacity to have values and boundaries?
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah, I think that we have to get back to a place where we have values, where we have a line that we know we cannot cross. Right now, we don't have that. We've recreated society to a certain extent to believe that lines are bad, that boundaries are bad, that judgment is bad, that if we judge someone for his sexual proclivities, we're the bad guys. Well, it's true that people can't choose to not have a fetish. They can't choose not to be attracted to people, children, animals, whatever that they're attracted to, but they can choose not to act on it.
Stephanie Winn: I'm actually not sure. I'm going to say that I don't know if I have a stance on that. Yeah. Yeah, I think I would have to really study the issue quite intensely to decide how I feel about the element of choice.
Anita Bartholomew: Well, you know, in Germany, they had, this wasn't an official program as far as I know, but they were placing foster children with pedophiles I think it was in the 80s. And the notion was that pedophiles loved children and they would take care of them.
Stephanie Winn: And- So wait, they were knowingly- Yes.
Anita Bartholomew: There was someone who was in charge, and it might've been Berlin, it might've been elsewhere. I don't have it at the tip of my fingers, but they were knowingly placing foster children with pedophiles. And, uh, the program ended at not, you know, before, you know, many, many children were damaged by it. Uh, and, and when you look at, uh, some of the, you might occasionally see Redux magazine. Yeah. Redux will often cover what's going on in Germany and in Germany they had a program We're talking about the choice thing. They were bringing pedophiles in for, you know, no judgment, come and get therapy. And hopefully, although they don't have evidence of this, hopefully if we talk it out and we accept you as good people with bad proclivities, that you'll be able to manage. your attraction to children. But one interesting thing that's happened is that pedophiles now want a voice in Germany. And they have eliminated criminal penalties for child porn, I believe. So if you open these doors, if you say, you're not a bad person, you just have a bad obsession, you kind of You move that line and you kind of open up a door to who knows what. So I can understand being sympathetic to someone who can't control what he wants. to a certain extent, but that's the too liberal part of me that's saying that, the part of me that's seeing what's going on in this country, let alone other countries right now, says, well, you know what? It's a shame that some people have these desires, that maybe they have a really difficult time controlling, but yeah, that is bad. That is bad.
Stephanie Winn: It's an inversion of priorities to think about the feelings of the actual or potential perpetrator. And this is where there's a certain segment of my audience that says, and I don't think they're the core of my audience. I think they're the occasional passersby who's randomly made it this far in the conversation. There's a certain type of commenter, and I'm looking at you. I'm going to stare straight at the camera when I say this, you random YouTuber commenter, because I know who you are and how you think. Yeah, there's a certain type of commenter that says, what kind of therapist are you? You're a terrible therapist if you don't have sympathy or compassion for this type of person or whatever. This is a podcast, not therapy. So what type of therapist I am is the business of patience when I am seeing patients, which I'm not doing right now. But that is not something I specialize in. And I've spent a lot more of my career specializing in the victims of those types of people. And if a perpetrator were to wanna be my patient, I would probably refer them to someone else. So I think that we do need therapists to specialize in the treatment of sex offenders. But that doesn't mean that I owe them any particular sympathy, especially not in my role as a podcaster, nor in my role as a therapist, advocate, friend, person with lived experience and so on of the victims. So, and the thing is we have to acknowledge there's a high prevalence of personality disorders in these types of people. So, you know, am I open to the idea that there are some people with pedophilic tendencies for whom it's coming from a place of trauma, and that they themselves have a conscience. And I'm open to that, absolutely. But in my world, it's guilty until proven innocent if you're that person with that type of proclivity. I'm not going to just assume that you mean well when you could very well be a sociopath or a sadist.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. I mean, I have to overcome, again, my very liberal and progressive proclivities because when I was a kid and I saw the Frankenstein movie, I felt really bad for Frankenstein. I really did. But I didn't want to invite him into my house either. So there is, I do have sympathy for monsters. But they're monsters, you know? So you have to draw that line and you have to say that, yes, it's a shame that your whole life is going to be lived as a monster. Nobody, nobody wants to be a monster. Everybody wants to be a good person. or be thought of as a good person, but we have to keep the monsters out. Just like when it comes to, I used to think that we shouldn't have any limits on what people could put in their own bodies, because that was an assault on liberty. And then I saw what happened in Portland. And I said, okay, so yeah, we do have to have- You mean like fentanyl? Yeah. Not like- Well, there was no fentanyl when I was thinking that way. But now I see the fentanyl and the meth, and I said, okay, we do have to have limits. Uh, so I'm learning to be, uh, there is theory and then there is reality.
Stephanie Winn: Well, and okay. I want to like get a little philosophical here and get into my view on human nature because I think that every human life is faced with its own inner battle between good and evil. I think that the eternal war between good and evil takes place in the heart of every single human being. When you talk about a certain type of person being a monster, I'm reminded of recent conversations I've had with the parents who come to me for consulting. And there was a conversation I had recently where we were using the term monster to describe this sense of this dark entity that a woman felt had taken over her son. And he was in fact quite abusive verbally. And in this particular instance, the son was very much taking after his father who had been an abusive alcoholic who the mom had to leave. So, the son was sort of running from himself. His worst fear was being just like his father, and yet he was turning into his father, but unable to recognize it because he believed himself to be a girl. So, you know, nevermind his height and shoulder width and his voice. you know, in his world, he could do no wrong. He was an innocent victim and he was a girl. And so here was this young man acting out very much the same types of abusive behaviors he'd seen his father act out towards his mother. So he was becoming the monster, but completely unable to see it. And I saw a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance in this situation. And this is not the only time that I've talked to a parent who feels like some sort of monster has taken over their child. And I think about a situation like that, and I think there is a battle going on in that person's heart between good and evil. And every single one of us has that battle throughout our lives. And sure, which force is stronger is going to depend on a lot of life experiences and choices, but it's all, in my view, just an amalgamation of life experiences and choices of things we don't have control over and things we do have control over. And so I guess like my view of human nature is that, yeah, there are certain people who have really let the monster take over. And I still don't excuse that person from responsibility.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. I guess we're getting really philosophical. We could go into free will and determinism. Right. We could. But no, I don't absolve them of responsibility for their actions, but that the idea or the obsession is in them that no one chooses to be obsessed. No one chooses to be evil, I don't think. I think that, you know, we can choose to overcome and or avoid the things that we might do that we know are harmful.
Stephanie Winn: See, I think we have some degree of choice over obsession as well. Because, I mean, I think it's a lot more subtle than our choice to act on a desire to hurt someone else or not. That is where you can draw a clear line. But I guess based on my thoughts, and this is also in the course, RGD Repair, there's a section on neuroplasticity, obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction. And I think ultimately that there is a role of choice, even if it's subtle, even if it's largely unconscious in what we allow ourselves to think, what habits we feed. I mean, it's just feeding mental habits, but thousands of times over carving those, those neurological pathways deeper and deeper. And I mean, change is easier said than done. There are things that I'm obsessive about, and it would be really hard at this point in my life to change the things I'm obsessive about, but I'm also within certain guardrails of what I can… Most of my behavior is within the guardrails of what most people consider morally acceptable. So I think everyone has a choice, I guess. I've just…
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah, I don't disagree with you. I think we're probably saying much the same thing. I'm saying that we, in my view, we don't have a choice about what we feel. We have a choice about how we act on those feelings.
Stephanie Winn: And, and thinking is somewhere in between the two, isn't it? Somewhere between acting and feeling, I guess we could, we could argue.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thinking has to enter into it because otherwise we're just raw emotion and we just act.
Stephanie Winn: And you don't have to believe everything you think. You can always think that's a stupid thought, you know? Like this whole, don't yuck your yum, don't king shame. It's like, no, you can shame your own thoughts. You can say that that's a stupid thought.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. And you don't have to embrace everything. You don't, you're still a good person. If you say no, no is a really good word. Um, and I think that I don't know what's happened in our culture that we have gotten to the point where we've, we've come around from, we're so liberal now that we're authoritarian about being, you know, allowing everything. And that's not good for us as individuals, as a society, as, you know, as anything. We need to, if we're going to live among other people, if we're not going to go run out in the woods naked and never see another human, we have to learn how to live in a way that's beneficial to our society.
Stephanie Winn: I think that's a good place to wrap up. Okay. So Anita, so tell us again about being on the lookout for your book, because I know it's going to be a while longer before the book is available, and then where people can find you in the meanwhile.
Anita Bartholomew: Okay. Well, Sacrificial Lambs will be published by Pitchstone. Uh, and, uh, I imagine it'll be available wherever books are. Uh, so, you know, look for it, uh, in the bookstore and on Amazon, probably in a year or so we don't have a publication date. In the meantime, you can find me. at AnitaBartholomew.com. Some of my prior work is on there. And again, what I do want to say is I'm so happy to have placed this book with Pitch Stone because the only other publishers that are even looking at books that are not 100% on board with the trans ideology tend to want authors that want to say, oh, liberals, bad people, bad, evil people. Look at all the bad things. Well, I'm a liberal, so I don't think liberals are evil people. I think we've lost our way. And I think we don't know that we've lost our way. That's the worst of it, because we are such a polarized society at the moment, where This information about what's going on is out there, but no liberal will look at a conservative site, will listen to a conservative commenter. And so you become an easy prey. because you will only listen to the people who are telling you, rainbows, unicorns.
Stephanie Winn: It's what I call a gameable heuristic. And again, I am just shamelessly, relentlessly selling ROGD Repair every opportunity I get. So yes, I've already mentioned it like five times, but I have a lesson on this in ROGD Repair called gameable heuristics, meaning are there mental shortcuts that you are in the habit of taking that someone else could easily hack? Right? And if it's as simple as people who agree with this statement are good, people who disagree with the statement are bad, or any other form of tribalism, you are easily manipulable. And that's exactly what you're talking about, is that anyone on any side of the political spectrum who has this belief, I can only trust people if they have this certain political badge, or if they use these words, not these words, and everyone who uses these words is on my side, and everyone who doesn't is on the side I can't even listen to. you're obviously a sheep. Like you can be led wherever anyone with an ulterior motive has to lead you. It's so easy. All they have to do is pretend to agree with you on whatever surface thing. And they can, they can lead you to some really dark places.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. And, and you, we all have an idea that we have an understanding of reality, but we're cutting off our access to a whole lot of reality by cutting off our willingness to listen to people who don't have the right labels. Yeah.
Stephanie Winn: All right. So you're at AnitaBartholomew.com. You're also on X. Yes.
Anita Bartholomew: Uh, I have a couple of other books. Um, and, uh, siege is a book about the January 6th, 2021 siege of the U S Capitol.
Stephanie Winn: Oh, I didn't know you had a book on that. Yeah.
Anita Bartholomew: Yeah. Oh, wow. Pretty much blow by blow what happened inside the Capitol. Everybody was writing about Trump. And I thought, I don't care about what he's doing. I want to know, who are the people in the Capitol? Why are they there? What do they think they're there for? What are they doing there? And it was fascinating to research because, again, this is one of the things that made me stop and think, I'm not looking. as widely and as deeply as I should at the information that's out there. Because I had an idea about these people before I started researching the book that these are awful people. They're evil, you know, right-wing awful people. And when I learned about them, they were misinformed people. They were looking at their information sources and not looking at the information sources that they didn't like. And they came to the conclusion that the election was stolen. And they thought this was the patriotic thing to do. Now, some of them were really bad people. Some of them were there to hurt people. Some of them were there to kidnap people. But most of them were just good people with bad information.
Stephanie Winn: Aren't we all in some ways? All right, so Anita, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure.
Anita Bartholomew: Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you very much.
Stephanie Winn: I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit sometherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at Some Therapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.