Swell AI Transcript: 154. Travis Brown.mp3
Travis Brown:
We used to have the wait-and-see protocol, like you sort of live as the opposite sex, you cross-dress or whatever for a year or two, you have psychological evaluations. As an adult, you don't just go and get the surgery. The doctor just doesn't push it on you immediately or the therapist doesn't affirm you immediately, right? There were all these boundaries in place until those got swept away and then the ideology moved in and also people realized they can make money off of these things. There are a lot of reasons why I think it makes more sense to wait. I am a big believer in, you know, autonomy and people being able to do what they want. But this is such a difficult issue for those reasons I mentioned. And I think it would just make sense to wait for a lot of things. I don't necessarily want to make them illegal, but should people be getting married at 18, they should probably wait. But I don't necessarily want to make that illegal. It's a little bit different than having a drastic bottom surgery where you cannot come back from that. At the very least, we should implement those rules that we used to have and make people wait a year or two before they do that. You must be some kind of therapist.
Stephanie Winn: Today I'm speaking with Travis Brown. He is a visiting fellow at Danube Institute, content producer for Genspec and Peter Boghossian, the president of The Signal Education Project, and an international filmmaker and commentator known for his thought-provoking docuseries The Woke Reformation, and most recently for the series Uncomfortable Truths. Those of you who follow people like me and Travis on X might have seen that the first episode of Uncomfortable Truths came out there pretty recently, and Travis is hopeful to release a few more in the near future. So we're going to talk about his film series today. Travis, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Travis Brown: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Stephanie Winn: All right, so let's talk about Uncomfortable Truths. You interviewed me for this something like a year and a half ago prior to the release, and you've interviewed a lot of really wonderful people for this series. For those who haven't seen it yet, can you tell them what to expect?
Travis Brown: Yeah, so the first episode is kind of laying the groundwork of what's going on with the trans topic and why this ideology, what the ideology is and then why it's spread everywhere. I don't go too much into the details about the history with John Money and all of that stuff because mostly I was interested in highlighting why so many people believe in this ideology, why so many people have fallen for you know, what is clearly harming kids and women, and some men as well. So that was my primary concern was what was happening with kids, and that's what drew me into it, at least in part. But yeah, the series covers the topic generally and then more specifically, you know, why people might have gender distress. I interviewed you, obviously, Stella O'Malley, Helen Joyce, a lot of people who are kind of experts in this topic. And so it's basically a deep dive on what's going on. And then I was trying to point to some potential solutions, like why are people doing this and what is a better route to go for people?
Stephanie Winn: And I've known you for a little while since before you started working on this film. And it seems like as a filmmaker, you've been really drawn to studying this phenomenon for quite a few years, which has led you, I imagine, both to some dark places as well as to some incredible opportunities to travel the world and meet amazing people. But tell us about what drew you as a filmmaker or perhaps given anything else in your background to investigate gender ideology.
Travis Brown: Yeah, so it's kind of a two-part answer. What drew me to these subjects initially, the subjects of identity politics more broadly, was growing up in a fundamentalist Christian home and being really kind of isolated from the rest of the world and not allowed to listen to non-Christian music, you know, secular music or really having my environment pretty well controlled, and then starting to question that and break free from it, and then eventually losing my faith. It was a very difficult time in my life to sort of develop my own identity and my own sense of meaning. So ever since then, I've been really interested in those topics and specifically in what draws people to really what I would call either harmful or absurd behavior just because of their beliefs. It's just, it's endlessly fascinating to me that people will do horrendous things in the name of whether it's a spiritual belief or a political belief or ideological belief. and for nor the reason besides those beliefs, despite the fact that they might not even have any evidence for those beliefs. So that's very interesting to me. And then the fact that I thought I would be more at home with people who were on the more liberal side of the spectrum, you know, non-believers. And then I pretty quickly realized after a few years that a lot of those people have their own ideological blind spots and get stuck in black and white thinking and demonizing anyone who doesn't agree with them. So, you know, I pretty quickly became kind of politically homeless. And even though I'm an atheist, I don't tend to put that out there as like a prominent label because it's not really a part of my identity. And I find that a lot of atheists are very woke. And that brings us to the second part of the answer, which is I was already making a series on wokeness and race and BLM and everything that was happening. in 2020 onward, especially. And so I was going to cover the topic of gender as just another episode in my series. It's an 11-part series. But when I started to read about it and then go to some of the conferences, like the GenSpec conference in Killarney, Ireland, I saw that the topic was just too complex and it was too in-depth to just make it like a 20-minute episode. So I wanted to turn it into its own series. So I just wanted to do it justice, really.
Stephanie Winn: When you started talking about the environment that you grew up in, I was recalling a recent conversation. And I honestly, my brain is so mushy these days, I can't even remember if this was a conversation I had on this podcast. If it was a private conversation, I can't remember. So forgive me, listeners, but a conversation about the word oppression. and how a lot of people with certain political viewpoints would say that they are anti-oppression, they are fighting oppression, would maybe even accuse people like you and I who question gender ideology of being on the side of oppression. But when you described, like, for instance, that fundamentalist religious household that you were brought up in, where you couldn't listen to outside music, that sort of environment to me feels very oppressive. You can feel it in the room. It's an emotional, a spiritual, psychological experience. You walk in, things are icy, there's eggshells. I've been in environments like that, including ones where I, too, was not allowed to listen to certain music when I, you know, dip my foot into a certain cult environment. So I think it's interesting because there's so much just backwards and upside down, especially with language these days where, you know, up means down and man means woman and all this kind of stuff. And I think similarly with the concept of oppression, it's oftentimes these people who are claiming to be so anti-oppression that are really creating this very oppressive environment. It has that feel to it that's just soul-sucking, you know, that instills this deep fear and shame of doing something wrong. So it kind of seems like, almost like your emotional intuition as a deep thinker kind of led you to investigate that pattern, that familiar pattern showing up in a new and different way in a different segment of society.
Travis Brown: Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the word oppression just because I think it's overused, but I think it was back in 2015, an ex-girlfriend of mine was, I don't know, we were arguing about something and she said, I think it was something about, you know, gender, you know, men versus women, and she said something like, oh, you've never been oppressed. And I was like, well, really? You know my childhood history, the actual trauma that I went through. And again, I think I said something like, you know, I don't really like to use the word oppressed, but it was a very difficult, very restrictive environment where everything I was told to do was you know, my environment was very much controlled by my parents and by the religious leaders and, you know, where I lived and went to school and church and all that stuff. So, I mean, you could certainly categorize that as oppressive and as something that, you know, was very authoritarian. That's how I would put it. And so, you know, because of that and because of the fact that for whatever reason I just have a natural inclination to go against authoritarian tendencies, I just don't like it when anyone says you can't talk about this thing or question that thing or think in this way about that. I mean, as, you know, free-thinking, autonomous individuals, we can have any conversations or thoughts or, you know, behaviors that we want as long as we're not infringing on other people's rights. And so, That is often another motivator for me to go into these territories and talk about these things that people are saying, oh, you have to have this opinion, you have to fall in line, you have to do X, Y, and Z. And I'm just like, well, no, I don't actually.
Stephanie Winn: Seems like you're making a case for why we need people who are low in agreeableness in order to have a healthy society.
Travis Brown: Right, right, that's true, yeah.
Stephanie Winn: So investigating it from that viewpoint, originally as part of the Woke Reformation, then you really decided to hone in on this issue and it's taken you a lot of places. What are some of the ones that have really impacted you?
Travis Brown: I think the first person I reached out to was Helen Joyce and she, it was the conference in Killarney, the first GenSpec conference was like just a few weeks away and I had just received some funding to make this documentary and she invited me to the conference and I was like, oh wow, that's a great opportunity because all these people would be there and I'll be able to do a lot of interviews. But it was a lot in a short period of time, so I started watching a lot of Benjamin Boyce's interviews because he had interviewed a lot of the people who had gone there. And yeah, so it was a great opportunity and I really enjoyed going to Ireland and interviewing everyone there. Yeah, it was definitely, it's a very heavy topic, especially when you start to get into what some of these drugs and what some of these surgeries do to people. You know, the term irreversible damage is very appropriate. And so that, you know, that was one of the harder things is to constantly be talking about this. I found myself, aside from just being jet lagged and working a lot, being even more exhausted than usual because of the subject matter. It's just, you know, it's just very heavy. So, um, yeah, and then, you know, over the summer editing it and searching online for, you know, articles and video clips and, and evidence of what's going on. It was just, yeah, I was very depressed that summer, doing most of the editing because, you know, you're just watching all this stuff and all these kids who've had their lives ruined and, Yeah, it's been probably the hardest documentary or film that I've made, I think, just given the nature of the topic.
Stephanie Winn: Was there anything that you uncovered that surprised you or that sort of took your understanding of this issue to a new level?
Travis Brown: Yeah, I mean, I was pretty honestly ignorant of the topic in general. And so when I started reading some books and then interviewing all these people, I interviewed 20 plus people and went to all these conferences and I've since filmed even more conferences. So it wasn't necessarily surprising, but what stuck out to me with the first round of, I think it did, I don't know, 10 or 12 interviews in Ireland and the UK, You know, in Portland, you just hear that, oh, the people who put forth this idea that, you know, maybe we shouldn't be giving medical procedures to children if they identify as trans. All those people are just, you know, hateful bigots. They're just out to get people. They're awful. And what struck me was that all of these, every single person was really compassionate, was really thoughtful. None of them were motivated by malice or anything negative. And even some of the people I talked to said, you know, we just don't know enough about these procedures. Maybe it'll work for some people, maybe it won't. So they were clearly being balanced and nuanced and very thoughtful. So that struck me and encouraged me that, you know, the people that I'm talking to are genuinely good people. They're not out to hurt anyone or be bigoted or anything like that. So that was nice. And, you know, there were other things that were just kind of shocking in terms of stuff I didn't know. Like I had the sociologist Michael Biggs, who studied this extensively and looked into the research, the shoddy research that justifies all of these surgeries and all of these puberty blockers and that sort of thing. You know, he described in detail some of the surgeries. You know, I won't go into too many details, but, you know, when you give boys puberty blockers and they can't develop anatomically the way that they normally would, then they can't get the vaginoplasty in the way that they normally would because their genitals aren't big enough and they have to steal skin from somewhere else. That's just like, It's just very shocking to learn all that and to think that like this Frankenstein level, you know, unscientific pseudoscience is being foisted on all of these young people. And it's just, it's just shocking to, you know, we haven't really come that far from, you know, lobotomies and other horrible, um, uh, you know, medical scandals that have happened over the last a hundred years.
Stephanie Winn: It's been my experience. I mean, I can't speak to the young people who take puberty blockers. A lot of the parents that I talk to have kids who are older and begun this process at an older stage. Some had kids who asked for puberty blockers and they sort of successfully managed to stave off that request, at least for a little while. But something I noticed from talking to the parents of the adolescents and young adults is that When it comes to the horrors of so-called bottom surgeries, like that one, right? So you're giving an example of a male who's been on puberty blockers since puberty, not having enough penile tissue for penile inversion vaginoplasty is the procedure that you're describing, right? it's like Frankenstein surgeries like you're saying with the using pieces of the colon or using even tilapia skin right like you hear about these things and if you just hit someone who had never heard of any of this with that stuff out of the blue you'd like to think it would completely shake them up right but it's more like sort of the frog in the pot Analogy, and similarly with the older kids that I talked about, a lot of them don't have intentions at first of getting so-called bottom surgeries. They're so impulsive and in the moment and just thinking about the hopes that they've projected onto the steps they do want to take. It's binding or it's testosterone or it's spironolactone and estrogen, whatever it is. They're so fixated on those steps and what they think will be achieved by them. And some of them have this awareness of like, oh, those bottom surgeries. I don't know. People aren't getting the best results. That's not what I want to do. I don't don't want to go that far. But it really just seems like there are so many young people who just start down this process and then kind of get addicted to the conveyor belt or to that sort of endless dangling carrot of progress. And it's like when it's not working, when it's not making them happy enough for long enough, the message they take from that is always, well, then I haven't gone far enough. So they might not have thought that that was their intention to get so-called bottom surgery, but then five years down the line, it's either that or let go of everything and let their whole worldview crumble.
Travis Brown: Yeah, right, and that's very difficult if you have realized you've made a mistake, or not sure about the next steps, and then stepping out of that. So, you know, the detransitioners are obviously brave in, at least in one regard, because they have to say, wait a minute, I, you know, I don't want to keep doing this, I made this mistake, and Yeah, so it's, you know, it's one thing when there are no body modifications, when it's just a belief that somebody's held for a long time, where they've, you know, maybe acted poorly, or, you know, many religious beliefs are like that, they cause people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. But when it's a belief like this, that causes somebody to act out in a physical way, that's really challenging to come back from. And so, yeah, deep transitioners obviously really deserve a lot of support. And thankfully, there are more and more, you know, groups that are giving them support. But as yeah, that's just I can't even imagine how difficult that is.
Stephanie Winn: I think what you're getting into approaches some of the things that I find parents need to understand. A lot of parents I talk to want to believe that showing their kid some sort of heartbreaking interview with a detransitioner is going to change their mind. But I often tell them why that's not going to work, because it usually doesn't, which is that you're asking your kid who's really dug into this idea that this is who they are, and this is what they need to do to be happy and be themselves, you're asking them to identify with someone who's been humbled by having made a huge mistake. And who wants to do that, right? Who wants to look at someone who's ashamed, who's remorseful, who's grieving, who's, you know, not… Their grandiose dreams utterly fell apart and hit them on the way out, right? Who wants, when you're 18 especially, to like look at that person and be like, oh yeah, that could be me, right? It's like there's a lot of psychological reasons why it's hard for a young person to remotely want to identify with that experience.
Travis Brown: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's a tricky one. What do you tell parents? Instead of doing that, do you tell them to do something else?
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, actually. So, I have them talk about trans people rather than detransitioners. I mean, it's very customized case-by-case, but if the trans-identified son or daughter, let's say they're 18 years old, and they're going to do what they want, right? So the parent's just trying to influence within the realm of what they can control, which is how they communicate. And, you know, if their temptation is to show a detransitioner video and the implication of that message is, see, look, this could be you. You could make a huge, embarrassing mistake, too. You know, instead of doing that. to use strategic naivete, so play dumb a little bit, and actually watch videos and look at Reddit forums and get things straight from the mouths of trans people, trans-identified people, where they themselves are showing the pain, the complication, the frustrations that they're having and things like that. And, you know, use that more like, hey, I'm trying to understand the trans experience, and this seems really hard. And that is one type of angle that works for some families because it does less to feed the sort of mental heuristics, if you will. Like the trans-identified young people, if their parents start talking to them about detransitioners, they put them in a box, right? That is, those are right-wing bigot talking points. So your goal is to not press those buttons of making your kid jump to conclusions about what you're going to say and where you're coming from. Oh, those are right wing talking points. Those are dog whistles. Instead, you're coming at it from a different angle. It's going to make it a lot harder for them to paint you as a so-called bigot within the frame of reference that they have. If you're saying, you know, I was on trans tick tock trying to understand what you and your peers are going through. And here's something that confused me. Can you help me understand it? I'm not saying that that's a guaranteed to work better. It really depends on the individual relationship. But that's just sort of an example of working with rather than against the psychological tendencies.
Travis Brown: Yeah, that makes sense. And that is one of the reasons, well, to back up that I've tried to take that approach with both of my series when approaching, you know, wokeness and gender identity. I've tried to take the approach of what can I say or what, who can I talk to, or how can I frame this in such a way that more people who are maybe on the fence or more people who are more progressive minded will actually pay attention to and listen to and start to be concerned about. I still, you know, get called right-wing and, you know, that what I'm making is propaganda in the past. So there's no way to completely avoid that, but I have tried to sidestep that a bit, similar to what you're doing with, you know, telling the parents to be cognizant of that when they're talking to their kids. And that's one of the reasons that I chose to put Buck in the series, because Buck is Someone who's very both passionate and outspoken about kids not transitioning. And that was one of my, again, one of my primary concerns. And so I thought, you know, who are people likely to listen to? Someone who identifies as trans and maybe has some warnings about what this means and what's going to happen and that sort of thing. Or someone like me, you know, a cis white guy. uh and so Buck is it was the obvious choice in in that regard and um yeah and as I mentioned off camera I've just gotten a lot of a lot of pushback and a lot of uh difficulty in including Buck in the series um and you know people telling me I should edit Buck out which really doesn't make any sense it wouldn't work at all but So it's been a frustrating experience, and for many other reasons, just approaching this topic and trying to reach people and trying to show them what's going on, it's so challenging because you have such such tight-knit communities on both sides and weird kind of factions that will pounce on just the slightly wrong thing that you say, if you don't use the correct language here. And it's actually on both sides. Like, you have to say either trans-identified or whatever. If you say a trans person, then they think, oh, well, then you believe that some people are trans. And you know, like it's just, it's so kind of mind-numbing and tiring. And frankly, I think it's kind of ridiculous. I do understand wanting to be precise with language because the trans activists, you know, try to control language and that's how they push things through in terms of policy and law and get people on their side. But I think that You know, these issues are just so fraught. Talking about them is just so challenging because you have people who have already made up their minds on both sides, which I think is fine. I mean, you know, we should draw the line when it comes to, you know, kids in particular, I think. Like, it's just very clear. Like, it's just obvious that, you know, if teenagers can't you know, drink or get tattoos or whatever, they obviously shouldn't be doing this, this stuff. So there are places where I think, yeah, hold the line makes perfect sense. But then there are other cases where these people who are saying hold the line are just policing people's language and, you know, trying to, in my view, they actually make it more difficult to have some of these conversations. So yeah, I don't know. I just, I've experienced a lot of frustration with that.
Stephanie Winn: Well, I've, I've experienced similar frustrations, not specifically over the issue of Buck Angel, but over all kinds of things. And I have Nina Paley's Gender Wars playing cards, and purity spiral is one of the cards on on the gender critical side of the deck so she's identified this pattern in a playful way and it just it does play out in so many different iterations everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame or infamy in the spotlight where you know they're getting raked over the coals for this or that I think a lot of it takes place on X, and I do have to remember sometimes that there are people who listen to this podcast that are not on social media, or if they are, it's not the side of social media you and I have seen that kind of stuff going down on. And I know this because these people come and introduce themselves to me. They, you know, they find my meeting booking link because I, Lord knows, get inundated with email and just prefer to meet synchronously with people. So sometimes people just book a free 15-minute meeting just to say hello. And I met some really wonderful people this way who would prefer to do that than to get on social media. So you know that and then then people who turned to me for consulting who found my podcast but again they're not on social media and it's like I have to remember that those are the people I'm serving those are the people who are actually taking the time to listen to long-form interview podcasts and watch documentaries and things like that rather than just like reacting impulsively to people whose work they haven't even looked into. But I do want to give you a chance, since you brought it up, since you brought up the criticism that you faced over Buck Angel. First of all, for people who don't know what you're talking about, because I know exactly what you're talking about. I've seen it play out with anyone who's talked to Buck Angel. I haven't personally chosen to talk to Buck Angel just because I only have so much time in this life, you know, I choose where to spend it. But if you want to kind of tell people who Buck Angel is, why Buck Angel is so controversial, and, you know, why you ended up choosing to feature Buck anyway.
Travis Brown: I'll start kind of in reverse. I chose Buck because I was looking for people, as I say in the film, who do identify as trans, but are making more sense on this topic than the, you know, random trans activists that we see. either online or in the streets. And so I thought, you know, Buck is very lucid, also passionate. I listened to, you know, a few podcasts on Benjamin Boyce and with Deborah So, etc. And I thought, oh, you know, I really like what Buck has to say. We don't agree on everything, but then again, you know, I don't agree with anyone on everything. And I personally think not only is it fine to talk to these people and interview them, the people that you don't agree with fully, but it's kind of necessary in so many ways for so many reasons. The fact that people can't wrap their heads around that is very strange to me. For one, because if you hold a position and someone disagrees with that position, it's good to let other people hear that this person disagrees with you, because you then have a chance to defend your position. And you might actually be able to convince other people, if you have good reasons for your belief, why they should also believe that, right? So if someone's attacking your position, you defend it. It's just better all around. So, and the fact that a lot of people, particularly on the left, but now certainly on the right as well, they isolate themselves from anyone who they disagree with. They don't want to platform certain people because it might make them look bad or they don't agree with this person. Again, I think that's silly because you can challenge somebody, you can have conversations, you can talk about these things. We do live in a, you know, pluralistic society that we need to, we need to uphold that plurality, I think. So anyways, uh, Buck is, you know, trans-identified female, and Buck acknowledges that Buck is a female. He gets a little confusing with the pronouns because Buck likes to be referred to as a he. I don't really mind that. Sometimes I just try to avoid pronouns, but I'm, you know, that's, it's just not a huge issue to me either way, and people will get very upset for me saying that, but I don't really care. And, you know, Buck's position is that being, you know, having a double mastectomy and taking testosterone works to resolve, you know, his distress. But I just had a conversation on Buck's channel about this, and we were talking about that. And even Buck admitted, now 30 plus years down the road after the transition or the, you know, cosmetic surgeries, that maybe there was a different solution that could have even worked for Buck. So even though Buck has said certain things or held certain positions in the past, I think now thinks a little bit differently about certain things and is very clear about how kids should never do this because it could be a mistake for them, et cetera. I think it's always a mistake to do this, you know, under 18 especially. But, you know, I think one of the reasons Buck is so controversial is because people pigeonhole Buck or anyone and say, well, you said this at this point and therefore you must still believe it and you're bad. Whereas people evolve, they change their minds, etc. And, you know, Buck has been involved with adult films and that's also a trigger for a lot of people. Again, personally, I don't really care about that. If it's, you know, consenting adults, then it's all legal. It's just none of my business. So, There are a few things that people have jumped on in terms of why they don't like Buck. And I think one of the other main ones, main reasons is that Buck thinks that some people really are transsexuals and need these interventions. So I get it. I understand, you know, I don't happen to think that after, you know, reviewing all of this. all these books and talking to all these people and talking to you know many different people on both sides it just seems to me that it's much it's it's it's likely that you know pretty much everyone could probably resolve their distress and get over their dysphoria through other means that's that's my opinion i'm not an expert but that doesn't mean that there's not you know a place for people like buck to disagree um and So anyways, I've just gotten a lot of, you know, pushback for those reasons. And then for some other reasons that don't really seem very coherent to me, that don't make a lot of sense that people say. But yeah, that's kind of the summary.
Stephanie Winn: Many of you listening to this show are concerned about an adolescent or young adult you care about who's caught up in the gender insanity and therefore at risk of medical self-destruction. I developed ROGD Repair as a resource for parents just like you. It's a self-paced online course and community that will teach you the psychology concept and communication tools the families I've consulted with have found most helpful in understanding and getting through to their children, even when they're adults. Visit ROGDRepair.com to learn more about the program and use promo code SUMTHERAPIST2025 at checkout to take 50% off your first month. That's ROGDRepair.com. It seems part of the criticism of Buck Angel coming from the gender critical communities is sort of like both sides in it and I think that's where Buck's role in pornography plays a role too. I think for some people the pornography institution itself needs to go completely. And they would feel that same way about a pornographer regardless of, you know, body modifications or things like that. I think for those who maybe don't take that position, they still feel that Buck's role in the pornography contributes to the glamorization and glorification and fetishization of these altered bodies. And I understand the concern about both sides in it. And, you know, I think I largely agree with you in the sense of valuing civil discourse. And I remember when my worldview was undergoing the most rapid transformation in 2020. I think at that time, I needed to hear from people like Blaire White. Like I went through a phase of like watching a lot of Blaire White. And now I don't pay attention to Blaire White. I have no need for that particular voice at this point in my life. Because at any given time, there's just only so many ideas you can entertain so many people you can keep track of. I think for me at the time, as I was kind of going through my own deep programming in a way, you know, having been part of the culture and community that I'd been a part of, it was sort of like, you know, it was hearing different voices but representing those communities that you'd been told were so marginalized, that you'd been told you needed to give the benefit of the doubt of because you don't have their lived experience. It was like that kind of messaging in me that had kept me from really tapping into my own intuition and my own critical thinking skills needed to be dismantled by seeing representatives of those communities who had dissenting voices. That's what I needed at the time. And now I don't need that. Now I don't care who calls me transphobic. I think it's all made up, like, but still I can treat people like people, like another person who's gotten another flack, a lot of flack is like Corey Cohn. And I've seen people go after Corey for just being, you know, having the body that Corey is stuck with in his forties. And it's like, well, sorry, folks. Corey can't get his genitals back. Like, what do you expect him to do? You know? I think the fact that he has such an incredible sense of humor about it all is incredible. And the fact that he can talk to so many different people is great. But, you know, there are people who just draw such a hard line. And it's not like I don't understand where they're coming from with the drawing a hard line. You know, a lot of it I think goes back to, did you ever read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt?
Travis Brown: Great book, yeah.
Stephanie Winn: Yeah, so you know how he talks about moral psychology and the emotion of disgust and like our instinct, our sort of germophobia, if you will, right? And that there's an evolutionary reason that we have that instinct. It's because historically there's a long period of time where contamination could sweep through a village and kill everyone. and nobody even understood germ theory, right? So the fear of outsiders, the fear of things that trigger disgust, you know, it's designed to keep us alive. That being said, that fear sometimes is very warranted, and other times we can investigate it and find out that that thing is not a threat. So I learned some things about moral psychology in that book right before the pandemic lockdown started. And I think there's just so much that happened during the lockdowns that really served to trigger this deep-seated instinct in us to be very afraid of contamination. And it really, I think, bled into our moral psychology. So that's the same kind of instinct I see at play when people are like, You may not talk to this person or that person. And if you talk to them, you're not on our team. It's like, okay, you're trying to keep all the gender-critical community quarantined so that they don't get infected with the mind virus you view as coming from so-and-so. Are you sure that your threat assessment is 100% accurate? Maybe you shouldn't be so sure about that. I can understand where it's coming from, but when that energy gets directed at me because I dared to talk to someone, that's when I, you know, appreciate it the least.
Travis Brown: Yeah, yeah, no, you hit on an interesting point of this idea that, yeah, ideas can be contagious and, yeah, also even somehow contaminate. Ideas can be contagious, but I don't think they can really contaminate. It really depends on what the person does with the idea, and I don't think there's any problem in hearing these ideas. It's something, again, it's very prominent on the left, but it's also prominent on the right, especially within very conservative, very religious circles. we can't talk to, you know, this person because they might open the door and make you think this. And even my own parents, they didn't want me to read Nietzsche because they thought that, you know, I would lose my faith or something. And I was already on the road to losing my faith and had lost my faith before I read Nietzsche. But, you know, so it's interesting, especially if we're just talking to normal everyday people. even if we disagree with him, again, we have an opportunity to learn more about not only what other people believe, but our own position. I mean, John Stuart Mill was exactly right when he said, if you only know your side of the case, or he who knows only his side of the case, knows little of that. So obviously, you do need opposing views to just better understand your own position. And maybe you can update your position. We should all update our positions if we have new, better information. And then, you know, sometimes maybe we already have the best position, the best way of thinking about certain things, and we don't need to change our minds. But we should, yeah, I don't know. I just think that people should be open to that possibility that they could be wrong about something, or even if they're not wrong, just listening to other people. You know, again, I think we have to stress plurality, which Jonathan Haidt does in his book. Just this idea that You know, we should all be able to sort of live and think as we want as long as, again, we're not infringing on other people's rights. I just think that's such a crucial factor, and I think both the left and right often get that wrong.
Stephanie Winn: When it comes to the need for something as extreme as a quarantine, it makes sense. So if we're using that metaphor, right, of physical versus psychological contamination and contagion, a quarantine makes sense if you either are dealing with an especially deadly virus and or an especially weak immune system. So I think we see, you know, some exaggerated threat detection when it comes to the deadliness of the idea that people are being exposed to. But I also think that maybe there's sort of like a lack of confidence in our psychological immune systems, because the way I hear you when I sit here talking to you, I respect your intellect. I'm like, Travis clearly has critical thinking skills, you know? I'm not worried about what ideas Travis is going to be exposed to because he has his own brain to, you know, question those ideas with and so on, right? And it makes me wonder if people are lacking respect for others' intelligence, respect for their own intelligence, respect for critical thinking skills. And then I think, you know, is some of that warranted because Maybe some of that is on the decline. Maybe we are losing our critical thinking skills. And, you know, earlier I was saying, like, there might be a difference sometimes between the people who really spend time engaging with depth material, like the material I create, the material you create, versus just kind of the fast pace of how we process information in this day and age. So it's like, well, yeah, I mean, if all you're doing is just reacting, and taking mental shortcuts all the time, then yeah, you don't have a very good psychological immune system, do you? Because, you know, you haven't really practiced the idea, the ability to engage with thoughts and sort them out for yourself, in which case, maybe you do need to be quarantined, because you can't trust your own mind, right?
Travis Brown: Yeah, well, I think there are two, my two initial thoughts are, you know, arguing against my own position. You can think about that in terms of under 18s. And I am very concerned about under 18s, you know, using TikTok and being influenced by social media and having these ideas essentially go viral, right? So I do think that is a concern. And I think that parents or legal guardians need to help guide their kids. you know, by challenging some of those ideas they see or by not allowing their kids to spend six hours on TikTok, right? So I think that that's an argument against my position for a certain population. As adults, yeah, so this idea that certain, you know, psychological immune systems are challenged or weakened or whatever. I'm sympathetic to that idea, but what has to follow, I think, from that is whether it's the state or some other group there has to be some kind of control over what ideas get disseminated and what ideas get planted in people's minds or what have they have access to. And that I'm just not okay with. And I think there's a good reason to not be okay with that. And so regardless of the fact that I'm inclined to agree with you, that some people may not think as critically, they may not think as carefully as you or I or many other people on this topic, that's certainly true, right? That's just going to be true. But the challenge then is who is going to be the controller of the data or who is going to say, again, what speech is allowed to be heard and what's not. So I think, you know, then there's a broader level issue there, which is just the controlling of the speech. And I think history has just shown us that that's problematic for so many reasons.
Stephanie Winn: No, I agree with you. Just to be clear, my point was more along the lines of if you, anonymous Twitter account holder, lack faith in your own critical thinking skills to the point where you're projecting, oh no, Travis Brown can't interview so-and-so or he will get contaminated by their terrible ideas. If that is where you're coming from, maybe you should quarantine yourself, right? You know, maybe living in a bubble makes sense for you. You know, that's kind of what I'm saying. So you, I mean, I think, you know, this is an issue that so many people are united in. At least we can agree on protecting the kids. What is your stance on over 18s and has that changed at all as you've done your research?
Travis Brown: Yeah, I mean, I had a street epistemology session with Peter Becken, Peter Becken, I think it was December of 2023, where we, you know, we have these mats of from neutral to strongly disagree on one side is strongly agree. And I put the proposition forth something like, you know, hormones and surgeries for trans identified people should be made illegal until 25, I think, and he strongly disagreed with that, I agree with it. um because there there is data on brain development and also if you just anecdotally and you know you see people on reddit and talk i've talked to many detransitioners and many of them were over 18 when they had these surgeries or did these things so You know, it's challenging because legally you're considered an adult in the U.S. at 18. So there's no legal precedence in the law. I asked Helen Joyce about this. And in England, it's a little bit different in terms of how they determine this. But yeah, I think it makes sense for something this drastic that's coming along with an ideology, along with greed and, you know, pharmaceutical industries and doctors and surgeons pushing a lot of this stuff. So there's a whole host of reasons why I think it, you know, it should be delayed a bit. And again, there are some exceptions, like you can't drink when you're 18 in the US, you have to be 21, right? Or you can't rent a car illegally, you have to be 25. So to me, pushing the age out to 25 would make more sense. And frankly, just doing what we used to do, I talked to, I think, Marcus Evans about this and others who worked at the Tavistock. We used to have the wait and see protocol, like, you know, you sort of live as the opposite sex, you cross-dress or whatever for a year or two, you have psychological evaluations as an adult. Like, you don't just go and get the surgery and the doctor just doesn't push it on you immediately or the therapist doesn't affirm you immediately, right? There were all these boundaries in place until those got swept away and then the ideology moved in and also people realized they could make money off of these things. So there are a lot of reasons why I think it makes more sense to wait. I am a big believer in autonomy and people being able to do what they want. But this is such a, it's a difficult issue for those reasons I mentioned. And I think it would just make sense, frankly, I mean, I think it would make sense to wait for a lot of things. I don't necessarily want to make them illegal, but like, should people be getting married at 18? I think probably not. They should probably wait, but I don't necessarily want to make that illegal. But that's, it's a little bit different than having a drastic, you know, like bottom surgery where you just cannot come back from that. At the very least, we should put those, implement those rules that we used to have and make people wait, you know, a year or two before they do that, I think.
Stephanie Winn: So I don't view it as a matter of restricting the rights of individuals. I actually view it as a matter of restricting the jurisdiction of doctors. So for instance, doctors don't prescribe heroin to whoever feels like they would like to get high. They do prescribe opiate pain medication very, very judiciously, and there are restrictions on it. They're classified and controlled substances. You know, we can look at other, you know, comparisons with body modification processes. I mean, you have tattoos, right? And tattoos are relatively benign compared to so-called gender affirming care, not without risk entirely. There's always a spectrum of, you know, what a person can pay someone to do to their body. But I come from the position that these are not life-giving. These are not health-promoting. They are life and health-destroying. And the rationalization for them is entirely subjective. So I just don't believe that doctors should be able to do these things to people. I don't believe these substances and procedures should be available. I think of it as sort of like a Pandora's box that we should have never opened. And I think there are a lot of comparisons that we could make with other ways in which technology is advancing and creating new ethical dilemmas that there are no easy answers for. Like now that we have this technology, people are going to want to use it. And what happens next? Actually, I wanted to ask you one thing that just popped into my head. Do you know who Josiah Zaner is? Or did you ever see a natural selection?
Travis Brown: No, I don't think so.
Stephanie Winn: Oh my goodness that's a story to look into. It's basically it's there's it's documentary on gene editing technology which is another one of these kind of Pandora's boxes. Josiah Zahner was very much this like maverick, like, let's free the technology to all the people and have them experimenting in their garages. And this is like how we advance as a species and just like very pro experimenting with this technology. And then they contrasted him with Dr. Kevin Esvelt, who is also experimenting with the technology, but much more cautious in his approach. Anyway, I had recommended this documentary to people because I think it's just a great sort of way of thinking through complex ethical dilemmas and then an ROGD parent informed me that Josiah Zaner is now Josie. So this guy who was shown like injecting himself with steroids, or not with steroids, but with gene-altering technology to make it look like he spent a lot more time in the gym than he did. I mean, he was experimenting with all these technologies to edit his own genes using CRISPR. And then fast forward a few years, and now he's going by she-her, and the analogy is just crazy. So that's sort of how I think about it, but I wanted to give you a chance to respond.
Travis Brown: Yeah, I'm sympathetic to that view and I don't take a hard line on this because I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm inclined to take the position that Michael Biggs takes, which is more of educating people about all of these problems and how drastic these drugs and surgeries affect people and then letting them decide. I don't know. I mean, maybe there's a different precedent with a different medical procedure that has been outlawed. I'm not sure. But I'm just so leery of government intervention that I understand not calling it medicine. I understand not, you know, allowing doctors to do it. But, you know. I think Stella said it should be classified as like a cosmetic procedure, right? That doesn't quite have the right kind of weight to it because it's more than just, it's more than that, I think. But I think that's a better way of classifying it, obviously, rather than medicine. It's not healing, it's not, you know, as you've laid out. So I don't know, you know, I could be convinced either way, but I'm just, I'm more inclined towards the libertarian position of, you know, getting people better information about it, but not, again, forcing people to, or not allowing people to essentially have sovereignty over their own bodies. So that's kind of my position.
Stephanie Winn: So episode one of Uncomfortable Truths, I saw it on X. Do you want to tell people where else it is and then tell us where you're going next in the series?
Travis Brown: Yeah, so you can watch it on X at Become the Signal or YouTube, same thing, at Become the Signal. And I've got some other shorts and things on there as well. But yeah, so episode one kind of lays the foundation and explains what's happening, what's going on, why people are reaching for transidentification, you know, in part because of the decline of meaning and other things in society. And then two, I go into more, the second episode, I'll go into more concrete examples of what's happening in families' lives. I interviewed three parents anonymously because they didn't want to, you know, hurt their relationship with their kids, but they've all had or still have a trans-identified young person in their lives. Some were below 18, some above. So I tell their stories and I'm working on that now. It may be a little while before it's out because I still have to raise some money for it. But I think it'll be interesting. I'm going to try to have some animation and really tell these important stories and then also give advice from all the different people like you and Stella and many other people that I interviewed too. give it kind of a well-rounded, supportive structure so that people are not just left with, oh, this was a, you know, is a devastating problem, but what do we now do about it? I'm always interested in helping provide, you know, ideas for moving forward rather than just showing a problem.
Stephanie Winn: I wish that I had come out with ROGD Repair back when you interviewed me a year and a half ago, because I have all these tools I've been working on. I'm not confident that I spoke about those tools in the interview, but that'll be great. I'm curious, have you spoken with any families that have rebuilt their relationships after desistance or detransition?
Travis Brown: Yeah, one of the parents I interviewed was local to Oregon, a friend of mine, and her daughter was trans-identified, and she went through quite an ordeal, but then slowly was able to help her daughter get through that and desist and not get a double mastectomy, and I think metoidioplasty, is that the right word? Yeah, so that's one of the parents that I interviewed for the series, and it was a pretty crazy story. Really.
Stephanie Winn: Wow, that's great. I'm really, you know, when I think about what's next as a society, like where we need to be moving, I think about, you know, as you mentioned, obviously detransitioners need more resources. I know you help with GenSpec to do some media for them, and they're probably the biggest name in providing services to detransitioners. I've heard there's a wait list, unfortunately, so it just seems like these services can't happen fast enough. But one thing I think about a lot that I haven't really had an opportunity to get my hands dirty with is directly helping the parent-child relationship to rebuild after desistance and detransition. I've helped so many parents without working with their kids because I just help the parents on what they can control. I'm like, look, your kid Is not consenting to being my patient. I'm not here to force myself on them. I'm just here to coach you and how you can communicate better with them. That's what I focus on. And I've helped so many parents get to the point where they're feeling so much better about their kids future. But I think about, like, the rebuilding stage and what it does to these parent-child relationships. Because, I mean, we've heard all kinds of stories, right? You've interviewed detransitioners for your films, you know, about the guilt that they carry. how awful they were to their families, how much they bullied their families into going along with this, convinced them it was the right thing to do, forced their parents to give up, then a couple years later realize it was all a mistake and they're just, I mean, that's not everyone's story, but that's one version of the story. So I think about like, how do we help people heal their relationships after a really damaging exposure to gender ideology?
Travis Brown: Yeah, yeah, no, there definitely needs to be more more resources for that. I think that's, that's really important. Sure. Not easy.
Stephanie Winn: So it sounds like with your film, you're hoping to reach some people who are kind of on the fence or maybe new to some of this stuff. Any other goals for your work?
Travis Brown: Yeah, I mean, that's certainly one of them. And now, thankfully, there are more and more resources and films and books for people to be made aware of what's going on. But yeah, the primary goal was just to lay out in non-political terms, in non-ideological terms, just what's happening, why it's happening, why we should rethink going along with this stuff, and point people to some more, you know, I try to point to things that are not so topical, so other underlying societal currents that have led us to the place where we're wanting to, you know, transition ourselves or transition our children. And for me, I think a lot of that is the lack of the spirituality, the lack of meaning, the lack of purpose for people. So I try to touch on those topics as well because I think it's important to help people to think about that a little bit more carefully. And, and I just think, I think it's an important aspect of life that people just kind of pass by and they get so swept up in these ideological trends. So that's, that's kind of the other goal is to get that conversation going a little bit more.
Stephanie Winn: Well, you had mentioned earlier that with your background in really kind of like a hardcore fundamentalist, this environment that I described as oppressive, you know, Christian upbringing, that you had an aversion and skepticism toward religiosity coming from that, but that as an atheist, you found yourself encountering almost a religious fervor around people's political beliefs. So it seems like you've, you know, you seem like one of these sort of people nowadays who's in this position of like, yeah, I don't personally believe in God or have any religious beliefs, but I see what it does to society when there's that void. Like there seems to be something about us as human beings that has some kind of spiritual need. So how do you fill that?
Travis Brown: Yeah, I mean, that's, I think, kind of the eternal question. Because I think it's clear that we evolved to have these kinds of beliefs because they've been manifest in virtually every, you know, tribe. There are so many indications of whether it's animism or, you know, the religious beliefs have evolved throughout history. But we certainly, I think, have been better off, evolutionarily speaking, to have beliefs that bind people together But as Jonathan Haidt says, you know, morality binds and blinds. So it has the benefit of binding people together, making them more cohesive, but also blinds them to, you know, better ways of doing things or, you know, creating enemies where they don't need to be enemies. So in terms of solving that problem, I don't think there's an easy solution at all. And I do think From my perspective, it has to be somewhat individualized because, again, I don't want to force people to have my beliefs or lack of beliefs. And as Viktor Frankl said in his book, Man's Search for Meaning, he said something to the effect, I probably can't quote it exactly because I'm too tired, but answers to the meaning in life cannot be met with sweeping statements. In other words, you can't just sort of lay out what's meaningful for everyone because it'll differ from person to person. But I do think there are some indicators like, you know, you should have a tight-knit community, you should have goals that you're working on that are outside yourself that are bigger than yourself. You know, for me, it has nothing to do with, you know, the supernatural or God. It has to do with trying to, you know, better the world that I live in or whatever. Even just getting people to think more deeply about these things, that helps give my life meaning. But there are all kinds of things that people can do. And I think that this transfers into you know, helping kids when they're getting caught up with the trans identification, you know, getting them off of their fronds, getting them to, I think, as we talked about in an interview, you know, do physical activities. There are so many things that people can do to get them in touch with a better part of themselves and to give them, you know, a sense of meaning and purpose. So again, I just, I don't think it can be, because I'm not religious, I can't lay out some you know, formula for everyone. But I do think that there are pretty clear indicators of what's more satisfying and more meaningful for people. And each person has to pursue that, I think.
Stephanie Winn: As we were talking, I was remembering something that a friend of mine says. So my friend Jake Wiskirchen, he's a therapist and podcaster, and he'll often say things like, my goal as a therapist is to work myself out of a job. You know, if we lived in a world tomorrow where nobody needed therapy, I would shut down my mental health practice and open a brewery and just serve the community and have fun, right? That's sort of like his mentality. about therapy and I was thinking about that in relation to you because you described how heavy but necessary it felt to do these investigations and you've been doing pretty heavy work for some years now. I was curious, if wokeness and gender ideology disappeared tomorrow, or at least you felt like your work was done, if there weren't so many problems to solve, what would you love to do instead?
Travis Brown: Well, it's still my goal, no matter what, at some point, I would love to get back to just making fiction. You know, my first film was fictional, just was a black comedy, very dark comedy. So I'd love to just get back to the world of film and just make something creative and interesting. Of course, there would be some kind of not political undertone, but philosophical undertone just because I'm drawn to that sort of thing. But that's, that's what I'd like to be doing with my time.
Stephanie Winn: When it comes to the creative arts, I feel like I certainly don't have nearly enough of a finger on the pulse to give an opinion about, like, the direction that, like, film or theater or literature is going or anything like that. But I do kind of frequently hear people express concerns that we are losing some of these cultural arts. Obviously, the lockdowns had, you know, something to do with declining, like, theater attendance and things like that. um you know just when it comes to like making good art i think i have more expertise in music and and i actually think there is really great music out there like i'm going to a paris paloma concert this friday so i'm excited to see her she's an incredible musician Um, but when it comes to your expertise, like fiction and film, um, do you, uh, have a sense as someone who's in that world of kind of what direction the industry is heading and whether, like, do you feel hopeful that creativity is still going to flourish?
Travis Brown: Yeah, I think so to answer the last question. I mean, I haven't really been in the, I've been making documentaries for years now, so I've been kind of outside of the film industry in terms of fictional narratives. But yeah, you have the one negative side, which is that a lot of content can be produced by some, for so many platforms that it's kind of watered down and a lot of it's not very good, but it's also more opportunity for better, more interesting stories and, you know, cinematography and, um, yeah, just better stories to be, to be told. So there's a lot of good content out there. You just have to wade through a lot of subpar stuff, but I think, yeah, allowing more people access to these tools and, and platforms I think is, is ultimately a good thing.
Stephanie Winn: All right, well, was there anything that you wanted to say that you didn't get to say yet?
Travis Brown: I think that's about it. If anyone wants to support me, please, you know, check out my films and share them around. But other than that, I think that's about it.
Stephanie Winn: So they can, once again, find your films on X, at Become the Signal, or on your YouTube channel?
Travis Brown: Yeah, same thing, yep.
Stephanie Winn: Okay, great. And do you accept donations if people are thankful for your work?
Travis Brown: Yeah, well, I have a GiveSendGo that's running right now. It's just GiveSendGo.com slash Uncomfortable Truths so people can contribute there to help me make the next episode if they'd like.
Stephanie Winn: Okay, we'll include that in the show notes. GiveSendGo.com slash Uncomfortable Truths as well as links to your other stuff. So, Travis Frown, thanks for joining me. It's been a pleasure.
Travis Brown: Awesome. Yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Stephanie Winn: Thank you for 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. And of course, please remember, podcasts are not 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, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair. 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 shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrman, with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.