Brandon Showalter – The Abuse of Language & The Ideological Capture of our Institutions (Part 2/3)

Episode 104: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

This episode features Brandon Showalter, a journalist and podcaster who reports on topics of theological and social interest. He discusses how transgender ideology has led to the destruction of language and the ideological capture of institutions like government, medicine, and education.

Showalter documents how transgender activists have twisted the definitions of sex and gender, and how this ideology has infiltrated schools and medical facilities, sometimes leading to the separation of parents from their children who are struggling with gender dysphoria. He emphasizes the need to defend children from this radical ideology while also showing compassion for those dealing with identity issues. The conversation sets the stage for the next episode, which will explore a biblical perspective on gender and sexuality.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable. Wherever you get your podcast, please if you like to show, leave a review. More people will find out about it because we’re interviewing guests who show that our worldview changes everything.

Now, this particular episode is a part two of a three part series. My return guest today is a journalist and podcaster with the Christian Post who reports extensively on topics of theological interest in the church and practical interest in society, including the gender identity movement and transgender ideology. Together, my guest and I co-authored an ebook that we want you to find out about. It’s called Exposing the Gender Lie. We’ll tell you how to get it.

If you haven’t listened to the previous portion of our conversation, you can go do that. Before coming back to this episode and that episode, we focused in on the medical scandal that’s represented by transgender ideology. In this one, we talk about the abuse of language and the ideological capture of our institutions. The next episode, we’re going to talk about the biblical response, but please welcome Brandon Showalter to the show. Brandon Showalter, welcome back to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast.

Brandon Showalter (01:17):
Good to be with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:18):
Thank you. This is the second episode in a trilogy where we are talking about the issue of transgender. And a lot of people are saying, well, why should you think about that? Why should we care? Just let people do what they do. But this has actually become the medical scandal of our time. That’s what we talked about in episode one. It has become an actual attack on truth and reality. This is not about children who struggle with their identity. We’re not attacking them in any way. We have compassion for them. We want to walk alongside of them.

This is about an intentional agenda in our nation, and we document all of this in the new ebook that you and I co-wrote together, co-gender that we co-wrote together, Exposing the Gender Lie, which people can get by going to summit.org/protect. That’s probably the best place to do that. Summit.org/protect. People can get that. But in this episode, I tend to make these super long introductions. I’ll just stop. We need to dig into two things, how this is actually destroying the very way we use language, the way transgender activists are approaching this, and second, the ideological capture of our institutions.

Brandon Showalter (02:35):
Yeah, well, I think those two things actually go together, Jeff. One informs the other transgender dogma, transgenderism, gender ideology, gender identity lingo, whatever you want to call it. The confusion and the corruption of language is precisely the point. It’s a feature, not a bug. And I say this because if the ideologue can make you believe that a man can become a woman or vice versa, they can make you believe anything.

And if that sounds all confusing, because your previous paradigm for this was, as I said in the previous episode, just a few people who were struggling transvestites in Mardi Gras. Perhaps that was your grid for them. Trying to wrap your head around this is a difficult task because it’s intrinsically unreasonable. Reason is not. They have completely abandoned reality. They’ve unhooked themselves from the material world, and therefore, any approach to try and understand this with any sensibility or any kind of truthfulness is an impossible task.

(03:44):
But while the ideologues confuse you, they continue on with their ideological aims and unfortunately those have great profit incentive in the medical industrial complexes we have also discussed. But if you try to approach this with any rational tack, it’s a fool’s errand. It’s impossible. And that is again, because you have to deconstruct and rename and twist the truth in order to first be able to engage this at any kind of semblance or respect for reality or truth.

But this ideology that somehow you are not your sex, that your sex isn’t a fundamental aspect of your being and that you can pick whatever gender identity you want. It’s the ultimate triumph of kind of a certain narcissism. The God of the self, as my executive editor likes to call it, where you somehow define the terms of your existence and that you’re going to try to reinvent yourself chemically and surgically and completely self-governed and to the point where you’re trumping biological reality, philosophical reality, every kind of reality, the self becomes the almighty God in this equation.

It’s one of the reasons that it’s so antithetical to our faith as Christians, but it’s also just tries. It trumps reality and most decent, sensible people, whether they’re a professing Christian or not, like living in the real world, but that’s impossible in this transgender.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:12):
Yeah, that’s right. And there’s nothing about this issue where you would say on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being super strong Christian, I’m not anywhere near a 10. That’s not relevant to this discussion. What’s relevant to the discussion is, as you mentioned, the nature of reality itself. And now if people don’t believe this is a significant issue or if they don’t really understand how it’s a medical scandal, they can go back and listen to episode one of the three that we’re doing here, and if want to understand the hope of the gospel and how it relates to male and female, then you can listen to episode three.

But in this episode, we’ve got a big task before us, and probably it’s worth starting with a little history lesson in the 1920s and 1930s, what we now call postmodernism to develop in academia. It said that not only do words describe reality, but words are the reality. So it used to be believed, and most people still believe on issues. Most things if they’re just reflexively acting on them, that there is a natural, normal, logical, rational relationship between the words and the things to which they refer.

Because somebody uses the word justice and somebody else uses the word justice. They may have different political parties, but they are probably thinking of something similar. Right? We know the word justice is not meaningless. We know it doesn’t just depend on you or me, otherwise there’s no point in talking about it. But the postmodernist says words. There is no reality that words help us describe, words actually make up reality. So if you want to change what people think about you change the nature of the language that they use.

Brandon Showalter (06:58):
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I remember taking a postmodern philosophy course in my undergraduate years and it felt like I was putting my brain in a Cuisinart, honestly. It was torturous to read because here they were making all these claims about what words mean while also claiming that meaning is somehow whatever you want it to mean.

And so the fact that it’s fraught with so many internal contradictions doesn’t seem to matter to the ev valid postmodernist. They just keep going full bore with whatever it is that they say they want while claiming that anybody who tries to be objective is itself an assertion of power over the other. It’s also scrambled. But as these people and these ideologues obtain actual power and they sow this insanity and push it into institutions, only, carnage results only harm because the world is not a postmodern construct.

(07:57):
It’s actually real. We believe in reality, it’s possible to know the truth. Truth is knowable. Reality is knowable. Well, postmodernists reject that claim. And as you also said, and I would concur 1000%, if you can take over and hijack and twist our very means of communication as a way of trumping your own preferred reality on top of the actual reality, you overtake our very means of communication. You can change how people speak and thereby change how people think.

The word Orwellian is overused oftentimes in the gender discussion, but it’s entirely appropriate because this is exactly what 1984 was all about, is that we have to completely override what we know to be true in pursuit of the party. But in this case, the party is a gender identity, this amorphous construct that has no tether to the material realm.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:54):
Yeah. Well, and when you use the term Orwellian, as you mentioned, you’re referring to the book 1984. Many of us had to read that in high school. It was shocking, a dystopian novel written by a guy who was not a believer, who was a socialist, but he saw what was coming. If you destroyed language, then you destroy social order entirely.

And so the way postmodernism applies to this particular discussion is, postmodernism applied to the issues of sexuality ended up being called queer theory or people sometimes gender ideology or something like that. But queer theory was one of the key terms, and I had to read this when I was in school. This is not shocking to me, that this is happening, because 30 years ago I was having to read these articles saying, well, gender is just a performance. It doesn’t have anything to do with being male or female.

(09:45):
It’s just a performance. You’re just acting the way you think other people think males and females should act. That’s all it is. So the performance, not the reality is what we should be paying attention to. Judith Butler, a professor at University of California, Berkeley is one of the key authors in queer theory. Maybe I should just read this quote just so you can get a sense of what it’s like to read this stuff because you and I have had to both read these articles, read books, and to everybody who’s watching or listening, you owe us extra thanks when you hear what this is like.

So this is what it’s like to read somebody from queer theory. Judah Butler says that the power regimes of heterosexism and follow centrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic. Their metaphysics and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the critical question emerges what kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself.

Brandon Showalter (10:55):
That is just indecipherable hooey. And I think brushing your teeth with a blow torch is more pleasant and having to navigate through that word salad. I mean, no one knows what she’s saying, and I’m not even sure she does, because when you become so fragmented and you’re deconstructing something as basic as the sexual binary, all you have is chaos.

(11:17):
Nobody knows what that means, but you can’t even understand it. But that’s why I said what I said at the start of this conversation, the confusion is the point. It’s a feature, not a bug. She takes 50 words to say what you could say or should say in about four or five. And it is quite something. It would be very interesting to do a deep dive psychological studies that.

What is it that causes someone to arrive at a point where they’re spending their days riding garbage like that? What kind of broken place must you live in where you’re pumping out that kind of nonsense and acting like it’s smart? But when you think about how insidious it is, because she’s far from the only queer theorist, another sort of famous essay is Thinking Sex by Gail Rubin. That’s kind of considered the founding document of queer theory.

(12:10):
When you realize how this has been gestating in our institutions, certainly in academia for decades, and now it’s close to I think reaching its apex within the medical system and in so many other influential realms of culture, you see the costs and the damage that it’s done all while masquerading as this inclusive, civil rights friendly, kind, tolerant thing. It’s predicated on this reversal and manipulation and the inversion of the way in which we speak to each other, and that’s a serious business.

And I would say also that it’s a big deal to God because he gave Adam the power to name the animals the sound of God when God calls us the very sound of God, even in the garden, God’s language transcends all of this, the corruption of speech. Jesus said, let your yes be yes and your no be no. And I know that was in a different context, but Christians should be plain truth speaking people not into these theories that are completely detached from reality.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:11):
That’s right. Yeah. And it’s the theories that matter in this instance because at the core of it is a theory, not a fact, not something that can be medically derived that sex and gender are two different things. That’s at the core of the gender ideology at the core of the issue of transgender. And so we talk about this in the ebook that we co-authored together, Exposing the Gender Lie. Let’s go to summit.org/protect. You can get a copy. It’s free. We’re not making money off of this. We’re just really wanting to get the truth out.

But it is a theory that somehow gender, which is derived from the words from which we get our word genetics or genus, so it doesn’t mean how you feel, it’s actually referring to a biological reality. But the theory is that somehow sex and gender are two different things. That sex is either biological male or female, but your gender is whatever you want it to be. And that’s how people like at healthline.com can arrive at the fact that they’re the fact quote that there are 68 different genders rather than just two. So you have to destroy language in order to elevate this perspective.

Brandon Showalter (14:29):
That’s right. And I think it’s entirely appropriate here, Jeff, to speak a little bit to the history of that, because I think speaking to the confusion being the point, gender ideologues rely upon the notion where I still hear people today using sex and gender interchangeably. And indeed, for many years, even on the forms you fill out, wherever you go, you’ll see gender, MRF. What they really mean is biological sex.

But gender and sex have been used so interchangeably in our culture, but the gender ideologue seizes upon that and says, no, no, no, no, no. Gender is this different thing. And gender norms that vary by culture are different, but sex is always the target. What I often tell people is never say the word gender, even if you’re using it interchangeably with sex, when what you really mean is sex. Always use the word sex because gender ideologues always try to attack and abolish though it’s impossible. Sex.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:29):
And to illustrate your point, Brandon, yesterday I was getting an airplane ticket from one of my children. This is the first time I’d noticed this. So this must be, this is coming at the federal government level from the Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration on the airline page. Instead of checking male or female like you used to do, you now can choose male, female, M, F, or X, other X, or I think it was prefer not to say.

You can legally now go through security at an airport with four different designations rather than male or female, that had to have come at the highest levels of government. That can’t have just been this particular airline that was doing that. And so now this is an enshrinement of this ideology at the very highest levels of American government. It sounds crazy to even talk about this. You know.

(16:34):
You think, am I involved in a conspiracy of some kind? But that’s why in the book, Exposing the Gender Lie, we have more than 100 points of documentation where we specifically address well-respected academic publications because we want you to know that this isn’t just some crazy people talking about this, but this is crazy stuff that is actually happening. And if everyday people don’t learn to stand strong in compassion for children who are struggling, but against the agenda that is trying to destroy those children, if we can’t learn to do that, then we stand to lose our collective tether to reality, as call it evolutionary biologists put it.

Brandon Showalter (17:20):
Well, and just a little bit more on the history I’ll say, is that the conflation of sex and gender as these opposite things, a lot of that, if you had to lay that at the feet of one person, I would say that’s John Money’s fault. Back at Johns Hopkins several decades ago where it was his notion of gender apart from sex, that was kind of the underpinning of his experiments on the Rimer twins at Johns Hopkins. Both of those boys died early deaths, one by suicide, another I think overdosed.

It was his idea. And he’s a New Zealand American sexologist and psychologist that did all sorts of nasty things at Johns Hopkins, that some gender identity emerged in someone’s life at a certain point of time, is that someone could actually be the opposite sex. That was his idea. So he sowed the seeds many decades ago.

(18:14):
Many people, to the extent, if they’ve explored what gender ideology is, they’ve seen Matt Walsh’s movie, what Is a Woman, and he’s got a section in there where he makes a similar point that I’m making now that Alfred Kinsey of the famous pervert who did all sorts of horrible experiments on children and also John Money, who I believe he was the first to coin this gender identity term as though it was somehow separate from sex. And so from there, this whole beast has grown. I think another, speaking of the language thing that it is a very notable shift that’s worth mentioning is the shift from what used to be called transsexuals to transgender.

(18:51):
To transgender. Because I think, and someone made this point not so long ago, might’ve been a British women’s rights campaigner article. I think I saw her tweet about this. Joe Barta, she’s a brilliant writer, she said, doesn’t it kind of give you the willies or creep you out to, and I think we wrote about this in Exposing the Gender Lie as well, to say, oh, I have a transsexual 4-year-old child. The idea of a transsexual child.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:19):
Right? The idea of sexualizing children.

Brandon Showalter (19:21):
Sexualizing children, whereas transgender softens it up a little bit. It seems more innocuous. It seems fine. It’s tamer. No, all they’re doing is manipulating the language. And in fact, Janice Raymond, who wrote in 1979, I mentioned this in the book as well, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She Male, and I believe 1994, she did a reprint of that book, and she has a section either in an introduction or a supplementary section where she talks about the shift of transsexual to transgender and how that’s an insidious manipulation.

Try and change the way human beings think and dissociate themselves from their bodies because that’s such the, again, sex is always the target. Gender ideologues are trying to smash, crush, abolish, destroy, biological sex. It’s physically impossible and it’s audacious, and you can’t do it. That does not stop them from trying. Everything you need to know about gender ideology is that ideologues are trying to destroy the sex of the body.

(20:26):
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that from a Christian standpoint, we see, we image forth God, male and female in his image, that this is an assault on that. Meaning the enemy, to put on my preacher man hat for a moment, he always wages war on the body as male and female because the coming together of male and female glorifies God. So it’s an attack on that because if Satan can do that, if the devil can twist and distort that he can rob God of his generosity as the creator of life, he attacks that with ferocious rage.

Dr. Jeff Myers (21:04):
Yeah, and we’ll get to that more when we get to the third episode, when we talk about the nature of the gospel, the hope of the gospel, but also just a biblical perspective and how it brings all of these pieces together in a natural way. I mean, what do we have to lose by exploring that? But let’s talk about, first, the capture of institutions, and probably, we’ve already talked a little bit about how the government ends up doing this.

You may have noticed that every third press release coming out of the White House now says this especially affects transgender women of color or something like that. Oh, yeah, right. Oh, yeah. What that means, if you’re trying to understand the lingo, a transgender woman of color is a black man, right?

Brandon Showalter (21:53):
That’s usually about transgender women of color who were murdered. That’s to pull on people’s heartstrings. Basically, those men who are involved in prostitution were killed. That’s what that is. But it’s manipulated to make it seem like this is a vulnerable, marginalized group of people.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:06):
Right? And there is a lot of vulnerability in this community. There are a lot of people who would manipulate them for their own purposes, both ideologically and physically, and the level of abuse is extraordinary.

A lot of people, as we discovered as we were writing the ebook, Exposing the Gender Lie, who are struggling with gender dysphoria actually are dealing with childhood trauma. Very often sexual trauma from sexual abuse, early exposure to pornography, maybe the boyfriend of a parent or the girlfriend of parent or something like that, abusing them. They’re all different kinds of horrible, horrible things that happen that lead to trauma that later on lead to people’s identity completely collapsing. And that gets ignored when you say, okay, well, we can fix this by giving you cross-sex hormones. You’re mutilating the body, but you’re not healing the soul.

Brandon Showalter (23:05):
That’s right. No, the gender Borg is held out as the solution to anything and everything. It’s my personal opinion, Jeff, that no one straight up has only gender dysphoria. It is always a part of a cluster of other mental health conditions. It’s a psychiatric comorbidity. That’s what gender confusion, gender dysphoria, body dysmorphia, whatever you want to call it. And a lot of it, I would absolutely agree, is either part of an internet fueled social contagion where people become wired into this social media milieu where this trend or craze.

Abigail Schreyer wrote about that in her book, Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing, our daughters teen girls are especially vulnerable to this. She makes a very compelling case about that, or it is rooted in trauma. It is a response to some kind of horrible thing that happened to them, perhaps a rape, especially if it’s sexual trauma, and it’s a part of a cluster of other mental health struggles. And so if you address those and those underlying conditions oftentimes, and the literature bears this out, the gender dysphoria, the gender confusion resolves on its own.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:19):
Three out four times, or even more like six out of every seven times. If you resolve the underlying trauma, then the gender dysphoria issues resolve themselves. Now, we’re not saying.

Brandon Showalter (24:32):
And in fact, in Finland, in Finland, Riittakerttu, I think that’s her name, Kaltiala just came out, who’s a big gender dysphoria expert in Finland, liberal Scandinavian, Finland, four out of five outgrow it. The stuff that needed if left alone, the literature bears this out, the ideologues in the media and the activists like to say that we’re erasing them and that we’re denying them. We’re causing them to commit suicide if we don’t allow them to go down a medicalized pathway.

No, the broad body of literature on this subject indisputably shows that you address the other mental health conditions you allow them. Puberty is kind of a cure, especially if we’re talking about youth going through this watchful waiting, whatever you want to call it. Gender dysphoria is not an endocrine condition where you alter your body with hormones to fix it. It’s just not.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:22):
Now we want to be clear because there are people who are listening to this who are going to get lawyers involved and say this or that because the attacks are going to be serious. We are not saying this as therapists. You’re saying this as an investigative journalist having interviewed dozens of therapists and medical doctors and parents on this issue. I’m saying this as the head of a ministry that’s deeply concerned that young people are being confused, that they’re aimless and becoming anxious and angry, and people aren’t dealing with those underlying issues.

Rather, they’re saying, well, just give them some hormone therapy, a tournament from a boy or into a girl or whatever, and it’s messing with these kids in an extreme way. So we’re not saying, this is counselors. We are offering the information here. And if you read the book Exposing the Gender Lie, summit.org/protect, then you can find out more about that. Do you want to talk for a moment about this issue of suicidality? Because I felt like there are a lot of people who say, well, I really want to address this, but I don’t want to push anybody toward thoughts of self-harm.

Brandon Showalter (26:39):
Yes. Well, I would also agree that certainly none of what I say should be taken as any mental health advice or anything, but just from the front lines covering the issue, I can, the literature, again, the literature is plain as day that this is not an accepted approach, and increasingly across the world, the European nations are backing away from this medicalized treatment protocol as we speak.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:03):
The suicide, let me just mention this real quick. The latest study on this from the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, which is one of the top journals in the field of psychology, maybe the top journal and marital therapy in January, 2023, reviewed 140 different studies on this to arrive at the conclusions that we’re talking about here. So it’s not like we’re just making this up off the top of our heads. This is in the literature. The balance of consideration weighs heavily in favor of the fact that America has taken a completely wrong approach and that the very people who ought to be protecting our children may actually pose the greatest danger to them.

Brandon Showalter (27:51):
Absolutely. And the suicide threat is I think, the worst manipulation of all, because activists even I’ve seen coach young, struggling trans-identified youth into telling their parents and the guardians and the authorities in their lives that they either are very likely to or will commit suicide, take their lives by suicide unless they are allowed to go down this medicalized pathway. Social services agencies in various states have been known to intervene. I know some absolutely horrible stories to that end, but it’s not true at the end of the day.

This is another lie that unless you allow a child to go down this experimental pathway that they either are very likely to or will take their own lies by suicide. It’s more junk science. Activist groups like to fill the airwaves with this notion. Now, to be sure, there have been some young people who have taken their lives by suicide.

(28:41):
Lela Alcorn down in Alabama, I believe is the famous case from, I think it was probably 2013 or 14 I believe, where that made the news where I think it was a boy who jumped in front of an oncoming truck and he was trans-identified, and it was such a sad, sad case. Well, activists take cases like that, and they use that sort of as a cudgel to manipulate parents into thinking that their children are going to wind up dead unless they go along with this. But there’s no research to prove it. There’s just not. It’s a scare tactic and it’s manipulation.

So the confusion and the hijacking of language being a feature of the ideology, well, this manipulation is as well, because no one would go along with this in their right minds. And since when do you make medical decisions based off of fear and manipulation? Since when? Sometimes you want to get a second opinion, review the evidence, review what other doctors are thinking, but the idea that you would scare a parent into saying, your kid’s going to die unless we do these experiments on them.

(29:50):
No, absolutely not. So you have to push past your fear. I mean, people who are, they want to speak out about it, but it’s like, no, this is an unconscionable power dynamic within clinical settings and in doctor’s offices for someone who’s supposed to have taken a oath to first do no harm, to treat your child, especially with integrity and not make you feel something like you don’t actually know what’s best for your child.

And to underline this, there was a recent whistleblower in the free press by the name of Jamie Reed who blew the whistle on the Washington University St. Louis gender clinic. And she testified that she was a caseworker at this clinic and that the doctors would just push and push and push to the point where parents felt like they did not have a choice, that they couldn’t even ask questions, urge, caution, suggest maybe taking this slower.

Nope, it’s manipulation, pure and simple, unconscionable conduct on the behalf of doctors and what are supposed to be medical professionals, but they use the suicide card as their chief weapon to threaten people, and it’s really disgraceful.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:59):
We would recommend that we should always take seriously thoughts or expressions of thoughts of self-harm. We don’t ignore. Those of us who work with young adults know that that’s a time to press in, not to back away, not to say, oh, you’re just going to get over this by the time you turn 18. Those are signs of real distress, and it’s important to take those seriously.

But this idea that has been promoted, we actually spent several pages in the ebook debunking the two most famous studies that are used to say that a young person who isn’t allowed to be given this $30,000 a year treatment will commit suicide. The two studies that are saying that the first one wasn’t even actually a study, it turns out because people say 48% of transgender people will commit suicide, that statistic gets repeated all the time. Therapists who are doing what they call gender affirming care are all quoting that.

(32:04):
So we look back at it and it turns out there was a survey that was randomly handed out in the LGBTQ community in the UK to 2078 people. So they just went out on the streets and said are you gay, lesbian, whatever? Take the survey. And then, so they distributed it just on the street. Out of the 2078, 27 respondents claimed, on the survey, to be transgender persons under the age of 26, 27 out of 2078. Of those 27, 13 said that they had at some point engaged in self-harm. Okay?

So no one knew because the survey didn’t include this information, whether their attempt at self-harm was before, after, or despite the treatment or even whether they had received treatment at all. But then all of a sudden in the popular culture, we’re being told, you are the one who’s being cruel because you’re driving these children to suicide if you don’t let us do $30,000 a year treatments on them.

Brandon Showalter (33:13):
Studies like that, again, the airways are saturated with them. And to be in the news business, to be a journalist myself, let me tell you, I have to sort of reassure myself of how grounded I am that I know that human beings can’t change sex. And then from that foundation, you can see how they manipulate and twist the truth and lies. And as a case in point, last fall, I guess it was the end of August rather, Boston Children’s Hospital had their own videos with watermarks. These doctors saying that they do these various transgender surgeries, including on minors.

And then when they were exposed more broadly by the lips of TikTok channel, everybody sees that and is taken aback. Oh, what? No, no, no. Then the media runs interference for these hospitals and these gender clinics. Meanwhile, I’m tabulating receipts in medical journals indisputably showing that they are indeed doing some of these surgeries. And I wrote an article about that, but I couldn’t help but notice what happened a short time after that where there was a study in Gemma Pediatrics that emerged after a couple journalists like me, called the media on the carpet saying, no, it’s actually happening.

(34:28):
And we have the documentation to show for it. There was a study that came out that showed that, okay, yes, it is happening. Breast amputations are happening to minors as young as 13, and it’s actually good for them. The narrative pivots, they talk about institutional capture and the corruption of language. Well, the worst is the media, which will then take these highly questionable studies and present them as ground breaking news. This is a good thing.

Well, yeah, we said it wasn’t happening a few weeks ago. Okay, well, actually it is, and it’s a good thing. So you’re being manipulated all over throughout. I don’t know. The legacy press has the public in a psychological strait jacket of deceit. I often say that, and the journalistic malpractice cannot be emphasized enough. It is terrible.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:16):
Well, your work as an investigative journalist is hard. You have to make a lot of phone calls. You have to pester people. You have to find information. But if somebody is just curious, they can look up pediatric gender clinics and up will pop a map of all of the places that will treat children and give them medicine and provide surgeries. And these hospitals, it’s not like they hide this. They advertise these services.

Brandon Showalter (35:40):
Right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:40):
Okay, so you can go to, I went to this Stanford University one, I went to the one you ministry in Boston. They advertise this now in Boston, they say, we do not recommend genital surgeries on children under the age of 18. But what that means, because remember you got to understand the capture of language here. What that means is we will amputate the healthy breasts of girls. We just won’t cut off the penises of boys right before 18.

Brandon Showalter (36:09):
There are anecdotes where they do make exceptions for genital surgeries on minors too. I’ve seen, I don’t know about Boston, but it’s indisputably true that, from 2017 to 2021, the Journal of Clinical Medicine documents that they did 65 breast amputations on minor girls in those short span of years at just one gender surgery center. So it’s absolutely going on and we can prove it, but you have to watch those slippery weasel words again, because that’s what this ideology does when it infects our medical journals and our institutions. You have to read things very carefully because they will. It’s dirty. It’s dirty.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:47):
Now, Brandon, we have a whole chapter in Exposing the Gender Lie, and I keep giving the website because I know a lot of folks are driving or they’re out for a walk listening to this summit.org/protect, and you can download this for free. Exposing the Gender Lie is the name of the ebook. And in the ebook we have an entire chapter on the capture of institutions.

One of those, and you particularly wrote this section based on some of your research, was about how educational institutions have been captured by transgender ideal ideologues, driving more and more children in the place where some teachers have actually told some of us, hey, all of the kids in my class identify as transgender.

(37:33):
All of them, because it’s the cool thing. They don’t want to not be transgender. They don’t want to be stuck. Nobody wants to be cisgender. That’s the term. So talk about the educational institutions for a minute, because that’s an important aspect of this ideological capture. If you’re a pharmaceutical industry and you stand to make $30,000 a year off of a kid, then you want as many customers as possible. So you get the teacher’s unions to sort of bring you the customers, which I know sounds crazy. That sounds like a conspiracy theory, but talk about what’s actually happening.

Brandon Showalter (38:09):
Well, I will absolutely do that. It does sound so crazy to people, but they’ve got to push past that. This is so crazy. I can’t believe it and just actually believe it, what’s right. But what’s happening all around, I think it’s increasingly unignorable. Now, I’ve sometimes referred to this as a school to gender clinic pipeline. Of course, all of the legacy educational institutions are happily doing the bidding of gender audio logs. I’ve heard anecdotal stories of guidance counselors even looking up referrals to local gender clinics with distressed kids that come and see them.

This is in curriculum, anti-bullying laws that have been passed in various places. The teachers unions also, they’re trying to activist organizations like the Human rights campaign, the big gay rights organization that’s completely taken over by trans. They have these model policies in the schools that if a child self-identifies as trans, then their parents are not to be told about that.

(39:05):
There’s actually some lawsuits against that kind of policy going on. I know of at least one in Florida, and I think one in Wisconsin, which was about a related issue about disclosure to parents where they wedge themselves in between the parent and the child, the parent child relationship. They disrupt that and allow the schools to sort of take over that is just totally grooming children into believing that they somehow need to go down this medicalized pathway.

And I think even in Oregon and California, increasingly there’s clinics that are increasingly of that flavor. We’ve known about how schools can somehow facilitate abortions of that. But the medical aspect of this is even getting into schools increasingly where that’s the indoctrination. And Christian Post did a podcast series called Generation Indoctrination Inside the Transgender Battle, which everybody can go listen to, and I hope you do. But push past that utter disbelief and horror that this is happening and recognize that it is in fact.

(40:10):
And to underline that point one more time, just on a separate but related note, Dr. Quentin Van Meter is a bold as a lion pediatric endocrinologist who, and I think 2008 it was, was at a combined joint session of the American and European endocrine societies where Dr. Norman Spack gave a presentation about this gender argo bargo in the world of endocrinology. And he didn’t think it was going to go anywhere.

He thought it was so crazy, but he was wrong because that was back in, I think, 2008 and the next year, the Endocrine Society’s guidelines, which I think Spack helped engineer and Spack was one of the people that opened, helped open the first pediatric gender clinic in Boston. Well, this took off like wildfire. You get a couple of activists from the top down, and this is true in education and in medicine, and they can engineer guidelines and policies.

(41:05):
And so parents don’t have even a way to vote these people out. They can’t talk because this is done within private or other institutions. I mean, sometimes you can go through school boards, but there’s no way that they have accountability with the public because they snuck this in. They did this by stealth. They used these sneaky insidious tactics to try and engineer this outcome from the top down within institutions that parents thought they could trust. And then all of a sudden they get walloped.

And it is disorienting when you find places where you thought you could get some good advice for your struggling kid, then only to find out that, oh no, we’re going to send them down this pathway of irreversible medical harm. But you’ve got to get past your disbelief in realizing that it’s as bad as we’re describing. And probably a lot worse.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:55):
Yeah. Now, and we don’t want to minimize the difficulty of the job of therapists who work with children. Social service agencies recognize that a lot of people, maybe they’ve given into addictions and their parenting skills are horrible. Their children are not safe at home because there are those cases. There are those cases. So we acknowledge those cases exist. But what’s happened in this instance is that organizations like the National Education Association, Planned Parenthood, have decided that by de facto, the parents are the enemy.

So I was just visiting with a parent yesterday talking about an adopted child who’s gone into the transgender cycle. The family has been forced away. They essentially have lost their parenting rights because they believe and they have strong evidence that there are serious psychiatric issues that the child is dealing with that are being unaddressed because the therapists are going straight for the gender ideology.

Brandon Showalter (43:01):
Very common story.

Dr. Jeff Myers (43:01):
Very common. It’s horrifying. I mean, just talking to this family, just horrifying to hear that. But what you’re saying is, that’s actually taking place on purpose in schools.

Brandon Showalter (43:14):
Yes. One of the places in schools where it’s sort of a hotbed, just a breeding ground for that are what used to be called Gay Straight Alliance Clubs, and now they’re Gender and Sexuality Alliance, GSA clubs. I know of cases that would just turn your hair green. They’re so horrible. And in fact, I was in Tucker Carlson’s original documentary on Fox Nation called Transgressive, the Cult of Confusion, and he profiled a story of Abigail Martinez, who I’ve seen speak. I know she’s a friend, and it was the school, and I believe the GSA club, that crew.

Anyway, in Los Angeles area where they’re from, where it was through that the Social Services agency in the state of California intervened and through the family courts removed Abigail’s custody of her daughter so that she could then be, I guess, I don’t know exact terminology, but emancipated from her mother’s parental rights and decision making about her medical care.

(44:08):
And because of that, the family courts and the powers that be in that state were able to sever those. And she was able to get to a group home where she could then go to the gender clinic and be put on hormones. And tragically at age 19, her daughter, the hormones made her so miserable. And in pain, I’ve heard Abigail describe what it was like for her daughter to undergo this experimental medicalization. And it did not help her problems. Of course. And tragically, she knelt down in front of the train and took her own life by suicide.

I believe it was in September of 2019, and poor Abigail was driving and had to get the call from the authorities. I think it was the coroner to say that her daughter was no longer in that they were retrieving the pieces of her daughter’s shattered body from the train tracks. This is just a nightmare. This ideology spreads death and destruction. And that’s why we as Christians have to be bold as lions in confronting it. Yes, it may be scary, and yes, you want to be sensitive to struggling people. I applaud that the Lord treats people with compassion. We absolutely should. We should lead with that. But this is evil.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:11):
That’s right.

Brandon Showalter (45:11):
This is destroying families. This is destroying children. And there’s people in high places that are hell bent on committing these atrocities, and it’s as bad as you think, and probably worse.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:22):
Well, we want you all who are listening and watching to take the next step, which is go to summit.org/protect. Download the ebook, Exposing the Gender Lie, 60 pages. We can read 60 pages. We can study this issue. You can look at the documentation and see that what we’re talking about here is actually happening. If there was a time where we needed to take a strong stand on behalf of protecting children from a radical ideology, it’s now. And we’re going to come back for one more episode, Brandon, you and I, and we’re going to talk about hope. The hope of the gospel, what a biblical view of gender and sexuality is.

Thank you to my guest today, Brandon Showalter, for joining me on the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. In the opening chapters of Genesis, God creates male and female man and woman to be his image bearers as part of his good creation. We need to defend the innocent and expose the lies that distort God’s good design. Thanks for tuning in, and join me next week as I continue the conversation with Brandon Showalter.

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