Jay Richards – Gender Ideology & What States Can Do to Protect Our Children

Episode 106: 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 an interview with Dr. Jay Richards, an expert on philosophy, theology, economics, and science. He discusses the rise of gender ideology, which denies the biological reality of sex and gender and instead promotes the idea that gender is a purely subjective, internal state independent of one’s biological sex.

Dr. Richards explains how this ideology has permeated many institutions, including schools and the medical establishment, leading to harmful practices like putting children on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. He argues this represents a major medical and moral scandal, akin to the historical eugenics movement, and discusses strategies for how legislators and the public can push back against this ideology and protect children from irreversible harm.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:02):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. This show’s available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Liftable, Edifi. Wherever you get your podcasts, please go to wherever you get your podcasts and leave a review because that brings the show to more people’s attention, and we want them to see these thought leaders who demonstrate that worldview changes everything.

Today’s guest is Dr. Jay Richards. His academic pedigree is impressive. He’s got a PhD in Philosophy and Theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. He’s written many bestselling books on economics, science, and other social and social issues. He’s also been published in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Federalist, and many other publications. He’s been the executive producer of many films, documentaries on all kinds of different things, including intelligent design. He’s been an instructor at Summit Ministries over the years.

I’m really grateful that Dr. Jay Richards is turning his attention to what could be the biggest medical scandal of our time, the whole issue of gender, ideology, and transgenderism. We’re going to get into all of it, including what states can do to protect kids. Welcome to the show. Dr. Jay Richards, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast.

Dr. Jay Richards (01:14):
Jeff, good to be with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:15):
Well, I love talking with you because you love all the kinds of things that we talk about on this podcast all the time. Intelligent design. We talk about economics. All of these areas are things that you have focused on in your career, and you’ve written books, bestselling books, produced documentaries and all different kinds of things.

But in the last few months, you’ve applied your talent and your interests to helping Americans understand and undo the influence of gender ideology. So this relates to the whole transgender conversation we’ve been having with some other guests as well. So we got to start with the basics. What is gender ideology? How did people ever arrive at the conclusion that sex and gender are different things?

Dr. Jay Richards (02:08):
Yeah, I mean, it’s a long complicated story, but I think the simplest way to explain what gender ideology claims is this. It displaces the basic biological category that human beings exist in. A sexual binary male and female that correspond to these two different gametes that you need to produce after our kind. It displaces that and it replaces it with a purely internal and subjective psychological self in which the psychological self has this gender identity that is independent of the body, and so of course independent of sex.

And so there’s a kind of transition. At first, we had these words, sex and gender, which were sort of rough synonyms, sex dropped out even on doctor’s form. So we were using the word gender. Most people use that thinking. We’re talking about sex underneath the tectonic plates. The word gender got replaced to refer to gender identity, which is this entirely subjective, supposedly internal sense that everyone has of gender.

And so that’s where we are, and that’s why we could end up with these weird situations where something called gender affirming care could involve not helping a child conform his distorted idea of who he is to his actual body, but rather transforming his body with drugs and surgery to conform to his internal gender identity. That only makes sense if you have the worldview of gender ideology behind it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:41):
And if you have the world of gender ideology behind it, it’s the only thing that makes sense. If you deny that basic premise that sex and gender are different things, then nothing about the gender ideology movement makes sense. And we’ve got this huge thing happening that’s affecting tens of thousands of young people, 40 some thousand young people who were actually seen for gender dysphoria, gender clinics within the last year.

So there’s so many aspects of this I want to dig into because people, obviously, parents are thinking about this. What happens when my child comes home and says, that’s actually happened to one of my sons? We were talking and he said, yeah, this person I always knew was a girl, walked into the boy’s bathroom.

(04:30):
They went right in the stall, and everybody’s looking around, what on earth? But parents are having children come home and say, we’re supposed to pick our pronouns. I’m not sure. I think I might be born in the wrong body. All of these kinds of things. You get the parent issue, but then you also have the public policy issue because people have to try to figure out, well, if minors are being mutilated by these procedures, isn’t it our responsibility to protect them through law?

Dr. Jay Richards (05:02):
Absolutely. And all that’s happening simultaneously. I mean, that’s weird about this because for people that haven’t been tracking this, which I would say is most people have not been tracking this, it seems to have come out of nowhere. I mean, maybe if you remember in 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in the so-called the Obergefell case, which involved same-sex marriage, an issue that it’s actually kind of related, but it’s actually a different issue from this question of gender identity.

And then almost immediately, if you looked at the media, it’s as if they got a memo and said, okay, now it’s time to start talking about the trans issue, which is what we were calling it at the time. And so the cover of National Geographic had the picture of a trans child, the cover of Glamour Magazine, of course, the famous cover of Caitlyn Jenner, and it just happened simultaneously and everywhere.

(05:52):
And the reason is because the organizations and the ideologues behind this knew it was time to pivot. Unfortunately, conservatives and Christians didn’t really realize that’s what was happening. And so this seemed like a new thing, unfortunately. But as you said, it already has worked its way into school curricula. It’s certainly worked its way into medical practice. You have supposedly medical organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics issuing guidelines that strongly affirm this ideology. So that shows you that it had to have been happening for a while behind the scenes. It’s just that it seemed to break out into the open.

But look, if you’ve got a kindergarten book that’s adopted by your school district, it is in school classrooms, something like genderqueer or something, even for younger kids that’s designed to teach gender ideology, kids, that takes years of planning. That doesn’t happen overnight. Books have to be, proposals have to be written, they have to be commissioned, they have to be published.

(06:51):
They have to create fake award organizations to award the book so that they’ll be adopted. All that stuff had to happen ahead of time. And so I actually described this as it’s like a phase change in physics in which things seem to happen all at once, but in fact, behind the scenes, things are happening slowly. So if the temperature outside is going down slowly, say one degree Fahrenheit per hour, it doesn’t look like anything’s happening until you hit 30 degrees Fahrenheit and suddenly the water turns to ice. That’s what this is like.

It’s like we experienced this phase change in which it seems to be everywhere all at once. It’s already in our culture and our educational institutions. And then of course, most kids, we think something like 65% of kids initially get these ideas from social media influencers, which are enabled by technology. So it just seems to be everywhere all at once.

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:42):
Yeah. Well, you have a strong background in both science and in theology, so I really feel like you’re the perfect guy to help us address this. Now, from a scientific perspective, there’s something significant here. You mentioned that gender ideology would displace the fact that we’re dimorphic beings.

Dr. Jay Richards (08:07):
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:07):
The fact that every single cell in our body has a sex signifier, a chromosome XX or XY. Well, except for gametes, I suppose. But other than that, other than that, they’re now cataloged 6,500 biological differences between males and females. You are saying that according to the gender ideology movement, none of that matters anymore. What matters is how you feel about yourself.

Dr. Jay Richards (08:40):
That is exactly right. And this sounds crazy to people when they first hear it, they think, oh no. What gender ideology says is, yes, of course there’s sex. Sure, but then we also have this gender identity that can either correspond to our sex or it can disagree with it. That was a kind of transition position. That is not the view that’s taught. If you look at, say, the gender unicorn, the famous diagram, anyone can pull up on the internet that teaches gender ideology, you’ll notice that it very carefully avoids referring to sex.

And you’ll notice this if you listen to the ideologues talk about these things, they will at best talk about sex assigned at birth. They will not say sex. They’ll say sex assigned at birth. Notice what that is. That’s a social construct. So they’ll say, they’ll grant, okay, we came to associate these particular secondary features with what we call boys and girls, male and female, but that’s an assignment that happens, that comes from the doctor or from a nurse practitioner or a midwife.

(09:34):
It’s not a statement about reality. The statement about reality is this internal psychological subjective sense that you have of your gender, your gender identity. And if you say, okay, so define gender identity for me, you’d think, okay, what are they going to do? We’re going to need to define it in terms of something else. They can’t use the same term. You’ve got a circular definition. They will not do that. They will not distinguish gender identity from sex. They will say gender identity is something like your internal sense of gender.

So then, okay, so what’s that an internal sense of, because you’ve got gender in the definition and the term. That’s the point because they’ve now completely detached what they would imagine is reality from the biological substrate. And so that’s why this isn’t just contrary to the Christian worldview, it’s contrary to your basic biology textbook.

(10:25):
It’s contrary to basic mammalian biology. So radical about it, and it’s hard to imagine that. But anyone that’s studied critical theory and spent time in this realizes, look, this is a radically anti-real ideology in which there isn’t, kind of, a reality out there that we’re trying to approximate and get our language to match.

Rather, all there are these language games and these sort of challenges of power. And so all there is finally is a kind of manipulation of language. That’s how radical this is. And so it’s really hard for people to quite realize what a menace the ideology is because it’s so hard to believe that people could actually believe this, but they do.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:03):
Now, to be clear, is there anything about a person’s sex that is assigned at birth, and where did that term even come from?

Dr. Jay Richards (11:12):
Well, it’s made up obviously. Now, of course, there are social conventions. So for instance, in the United States, we associate the color pink with girls and blue with boys. That’s entirely conventional, obviously, right? There’s nothing about the biology of being male or female that would sort of have that be a signifier. The English words male and female, we could have used different words. So obviously there are social conventions that attach to these things.

Then there are, say, sex or gender stereotypes. So things that we stereotypically associate with males or females, I think many of those are actually based in biology, so that’s why the stereotypes exist. It’s just that those traits, they tend to exist along a normal distribution. That is a bell curve. So in other words, there’s sort of gender or sex typical characteristics and then atypical characteristics. And so that’s why it’s important to realize that, look, if you’re a girl that doesn’t care about dolls and you like sports and you don’t necessarily want to wear really dresses or whatever, you may be gender atypical.

(12:12):
That’s the term. That doesn’t mean you’re a boy. It just means that, okay, you’re kind of an outlier when it comes to these particular traits. And we had this category, everybody knew this. This is why we had the word tomboy. That’s what it meant. We didn’t think, well, a tomboy is a girl that’s really a boy or something like that. That’s weird about this.

But once you detach both the conventions, the stereotypes from sex, all you have is stereotypes. If you look at these questionnaires that kids are supposed to answer to figure out their gender identity, it will ask questions like, well, do you like dolls? Do you like to wear dresses? Do you like the color pink or the color blue? In other words, all you have are the stereotypes at this point.

So that’s the irony is that people that think they’re progressive, that have gotten beyond stereotypical understandings of male and female, have actually abandoned the categories of male and female. And now all they’ve got is the stereotypes. That’s the kind of bitter irony of this whole thing.

Dr. Jeff Myers (13:07):
That’s a bitter irony. Indeed. So in attempting to overcome the stereotypes, they end up enshrining them.

Dr. Jay Richards (13:13):
Yes. Yeah, that’s absolutely crazy. Now, I should say, Jeff, that of course there are what are called disorders of sexual development. So this very rare condition in which a child is born either with abnormal chromosomes or something that happens in development hormonally in which they don’t develop on the normal pathway. So for instance, under normal development, males will have XX or XY chromosomes and females have XX chromosomes. There are variations.

That doesn’t mean that the person is not male or female, it just means that it’s more complex and not as easy to see. But those are, first of all, they’re very rare, well understood biological conditions, and they have nothing to do with gender ideology. So a man that claims he’s a woman in transition normally doesn’t suffer from a disorder of sexual development. He probably has XY chromosomes and all the sexes, all the cells except as gametes.

(14:10):
He went through male puberty, he had secondary sex characteristics, that is, the body parts of a male. It’s just that he decided or maybe believes that he’s not a male. And so he took drugs and underwent surgery to try to conform the outward presentation of his body to whatever that gender identity is. And incidentally, the gender identity, not necessarily just the opposite sex, because as I said, if gender identity is independent of sex, then it doesn’t have to conform to male or female.

So it’s not like you could be a male thinking you’re female or vice versa. You could be a male That’s really non-binary, really non-binary. So in other words, you either transcend the sexual distinction or maybe you encompass both or neither. So that’s why you can get these 73 or 104 different genders because they truly are gender identities, are independent of sex, and so they can refer to almost anything.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:06):
Wow. Now, I think young people who are being taught this in school, they may actually be under the impression that using, say puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, they can switch from being a male to being a female.

Dr. Jay Richards (15:26):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:26):
They actually believe that.

Dr. Jay Richards (15:28):
That’s right. Yeah. This is one of the scandals here that, first of all, I don’t actually think a child can give informed consent to a process that leads to his or her long-term sterilization. I just don’t think a child is in the position to be able to do that. But even ideally, you’d want them to get the basic information.

And a basic piece of information is that if you’re male, you cannot become female by taking estrogen. You cannot become female by having your penis and testes removed. You can make yourself look less like a male or more like a female, but that’s a different thing.

And so very often kids that are so kids that will go through part of this process and then realize it was a mistake that will often say, look, the doctor didn’t explain this to me. The doctor who removed my healthy breasts didn’t tell me I would never be able to nurse children.

(16:20):
Of course, at the time, maybe I wouldn’t have cared because I didn’t think I was a woman anyway, but that’s just kind of the basic informed consent that you would deed. So the kids understand first what this is going to do and then what it can’t possibly do. But remember the claim of gender ideology is that if you have a gender identity that is female, you are a female already. And so what the surgery does and the drugs do is it just sort of conforms it to this prior reality.

So it wouldn’t occur to them to say, now this can’t make you a female, because remember, according to gender ideology, they already are. That’s sort of crazy. But it’s actually, it takes a long time and it’s not necessarily healthy to get yourself in this framework to even understand exactly what’s being said.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:05):
Yeah. Okay. Well, given all the confusions here, Jay, then there are a couple of questions I really wanted to dig in on first because I know that you studied theology. Your doctorate is in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary, doctor of Philosophy degree, and I’d love for you to talk about a biblical perspective. So a lot of the people who are watching or listening to this, they instinctively think of trying to figure out how the Bible applies to what’s happening here.

But then the second thing we’ve got to talk about here, and I think you’re the guy to do it, is what should state legislatures be? What should school boards be doing if this is a genuine confusion based on a radical academic ideology, as we’ve discussed, if it is somehow being fed by a social media contagion, if pharmaceutical companies, and I know this sounds sinister to say it this way, but the medical industrial complex have found ways to make billions of dollars in profit off of the confusion that children experience, then somehow there is a role for law to step in here. So we’ve got to talk about that. Well, can we talk about the Bible and gender and sexuality?

Dr. Jay Richards (18:29):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so I mean, honestly, 20 something years ago, so my degree, it was a program called Philosophy and Theology. I had two comps in philosophy, two in theology, and one in ethics, which at the time, it was amazing preparation for this. Honestly, though, I don’t think I would’ve imagined this 20 something years ago because really this, first of all, we’re dealing with a philosophical worldview that emerges from cultural Marxism and postmodernism, but you also are actually dealing with scientific assumptions. And then of course the theological questions.

And so now here’s the good thing. If you’re a Christian, look, if you’re a Christian or a Jew or one of the Abrahamic faiths, if you think that the Old Testament and the opening chapters of Genesis have authority and they tell us something true about human nature in reality, well, you’re already a step up, right?

(19:19):
Because we believe God created human beings, male and female. We are equal in value and dignity, but we are differentiated and different, and it requires exactly one fertile male and one fertile female coming together to produce after our kind and to be fruitful and multiply, which is God’s original commandment and blessing to us. So that’s the biblical testimony. And if people ask people, well, so what should religious leaders and pastors and priests, what should they be doing?

Well, the first thing to do is get clear on that. I mean, if you just focus on scripture, you’re going to really help people, because a lot of people don’t quite understand what this means, that yes, we are equal in value and dignity as humans, but humans are sexed beings. We are male and female, and that’s a crucial part of the story. And we shouldn’t pretend that those are exactly the same.

(20:07):
In fact, we do great violence to human beings if we do that. So that’s the kind of key thing. But the other thing in Christian theology is this idea that God reveals himself specially in Scripture, but he can also reveal himself in what historically was called the book of nature, that the natural world, as the psalmist says, the heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Or as Paul says in Romans 1, that from the foundation of the world, God’s invisible qualities and eternal power have been clearly seen from the things that have been made. In other words, Paul is saying that the natural world itself reveals something about God. Now, it’s not going to tell us everything. It’s not going to reveal the Trinity or God’s personal name. It will reveal that there’s a creator. If we look at the book of nature accurately, we can read through it to its author.

(20:56):
That’s I think, a clear claim of scripture and a traditional Christian theological claim. So that means the natural world has its own logic in its own meaning that can be discerned if we study it. And that’s science at its best studying the natural world, finding out what it’s really like, what rules and laws and principles apply. And here’s the good news is that the natural world testifies very clearly to the reality of sex.

That’s why every culture in every time and place in every religion has recognized the sexual binary. The very idea that that would be contested is only a product of late modernity that only recently occurred to anyone to dispute that. So that’s why we hadn’t bothered to have to defend it. So that’s the good news. We’ve got the Book of Nature and the book of scripture that are in perfect agreement on this and are testifying very clearly.

(21:45):
That’s the good news. That means that gender ideology is ultimately going to run up against the sharp rocks of reality, and reality is going to win. The bad news is that people and laws and culture and children are caught in the middle before that moment in which reality finally is victorious. And that’s why we have to figure out, okay, what are we going to do with education policy and with medical policy in the meantime when kids are actually being experimented on?

Because I would say gender medicine for kids, that is the worst possible manifestation of gender ideology. It’s bad enough to confuse kids as to their identity. It’s even worse when we confuse them so much that they’re willing to sterilize themselves and think that sterilizing themselves is the only way that they can be happy. That’s where we are, and that’s why I think we absolutely have to talk about what we’re going to do about it politically and legally.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:42):
Yeah. Well, that’s really helpful. When you look at Genesis, you realize it is not possible for somebody to have been born in the wrong body, that your body was given to you by God. You are male or female. Males and females harmonize with one another to bear the image of God in a unique way as sexed individuals. And then we move on from there into, as you mentioned, the medicalization.

So what actually happens here, and I think one thing we’ve got to do, and we’re releasing an ebook on this topic and going into it somewhat, but I’ve read over the standards of care that doctors are given by which they are supposed to treat gender dysphoria.

Now, if you’re a medical doctor and you’re not abiding by the standards of care that are given to you by your association, so let’s say you’re an endocrinologist, the Endocrine Society or the Pediatric Endocrine Society, American Medical Association, or American Pediatric Association, all these different, whatever they are, if you look it up and say, this is what could go wrong with a person, here is how you treat it. If you depart from that, you’re legally at risk for having mistreated a patient. Am I correct in saying that?

Dr. Jay Richards (24:07):
That’s right. Okay. That’s right. Yeah, with well-established standards of care. That’s exactly right. It’s the whole point that these licensing organizations hold doctors to account based on, okay, look, this is what we know based on the evidence, and this is the best way to treat them. And if you just do something that’s completely out of keeping with that, you can have your license revoked.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:24):
So these standards of care are published on the internet. It’s not like it’s a secret. Everything that your doctor does the standards of care for that is published on the internet, so your doctor doesn’t know a thousand different diseases. Your doctor says, I’ll be back in just a moment. And they go look at their computer and they figure out, oh, just to remind themselves what is the proper process of care for whatever ailment you have.

(24:47):
So when they go check this for gender dysphoria, it has several steps. The first step is social transition. That’s right. That as soon as the child says, I know I am biologically a girl, but I think I’m a boy, then the doctor is instructed to immediately begin treating the child as what the child says he or she is. That’s right. Then instructing the parents. So you brought in here a boy, you now have a girl, her name is such and such, and here are her pronouns, and you will begin to use these pronouns with her unless you want her to risk self-harm.

Dr. Jay Richards (25:33):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (25:33):
And then they say the same thing to the doctors. You had a Joe in class yesterday. Today you have a Jill. And you will now be using female pronouns or whatever for this person. So everybody in the class then has to adjust. In other words, it’s trying to adjust all of the social spheres around the child to adjust to what the child has said in this treatment.

If that does not bring relief, the standards of care specified, the next step is a medical transition. And the medical transition for a child who hasn’t gone through puberty yet is to pause puberty, right? Using a puberty blocking drug like Lupron, which we know has other uses for endometriosis or for prostate cancer or chemical castration of habitual sex offenders.

Dr. Jay Richards (26:24):
Right?

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:24):
Okay. So they give that to the child as the natural course of care. Do I have that right?

Dr. Jay Richards (26:30):
You do. That’s exactly right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:31):
So this is what, unless you want to be sued or as a doctor, this is what the standards of care says has to happen next until the patient feels a sense of comfort with their gender identity.

Dr. Jay Richards (26:47):
That’s right, yes. And that’s right. And so it goes there. And then of course the next step is cross-sex hormones. So that would be testosterone generally for girls, so the male hormone and estrogen for boys to transition them to female.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:04):
We should be clear, if that’s the one, two process, what are the chances that that child will be sterile at that point and never able to bear children?

Dr. Jay Richards (27:13):
The longer it goes, the greater the chance. So puberty blockers alone atrophy, of course, the development. Testosterone for girls though are going to atrophy the uterus and the ovaries and do just kind of what you would expect. This goes on too long. She could be sterile just from that before she ever gets to the surgical interventions, which will by definition sterilize her if you remove her sex organs. And so that’s the kind of transition.

This is why many of us call this the school to sterilization pipeline because the social transition often starts in schools, sometimes between behind parents’ backs, which as you said, doctors, if you’re a pediatrician, and it is really the American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, so they call it guidelines, and they’re a little vague. This is the implication, what we’re describing here, but they will talk about comprehensive gender affirming care, but you will discover that there’s no alternative.

(28:06):
For instance, they don’t consider, well, maybe you should have the child undergo counseling for several years and see if he or she becomes comfortable with his or her body. That’s not an alternative. In fact, in 22 states, about 22 states, it’s illegal. That’s called conversion therapy. So there’s basically one option here, and if a child starts social transition, they are very likely to go on to cross-ex hormones. So you’re basically fast tracking them to hormones just when you start this psychosocial intervention.

So itself interferes with what would otherwise be a different process. We know before all this craze started, the vast majority of kids that had these gender confusion and dysphoria actually grew out of it once they got through puberty, if you socially transition, you’re basically fast tracking them to full transition, unfortunately. So the intervention itself helps lock in the problem. Now, this only makes sense if you realize the way the pathology was redefined.

(29:06):
So in an earlier version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they had a condition called gender identity disorder in which the disorder was that you identified as a sex or a gender different from your biological sex. So that was the problem, right? Okay. Well then the way you’d fix that is to help the person adjust to their sexual reality. That was changed to gender dysphoria, which just means discomfort with your gender or your sex, in which in that case, the way you treat it is just to relieve the discomfort. And if you’ve ruled out all the alternatives, the way to relieve the discomfort is to try to conform the body to match the internal sense of gender.

So you can see how all these pieces are now in place basically to shoehorn us into this one intervention effectively. And here’s the key thing to understand. Standards of care, they’re developed normally, developed over time, based on the best scientific evidence available, ideally long-term studies, comparisons of the alternatives, randomized control trials, ideally things like comprehensive review of the evidence.

(30:16):
We know that none of these medical organizations did that in this case. How do we know that? Well, we know because nobody had even done a systematic review of the evidence until a few years ago, and that was done by countries like Sweden and Finland and the UK who have now changed their minds. And we know there are no randomized control trials that test the long-term viability of this because none have been done.

So we know that whatever these guidelines of these medical organizations are based on, they’re not based on the normal protocols and standards that these organizations would use for almost any other issue, which to me screams the fact that what we have is ideological capture of these organizations rather than a fair look at the scientific evidence.

Dr. Jeff Myers (30:58):
Well, that is so well stated and so incredibly shocking, but we’ve got to also acknowledge a monetary aspect of this.

Dr. Jay Richards (31:08):
Oh yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:08):
A pharmaceutical company selling Lupron for pediatric use is going to set the family back, what, $30,000 a year or something like that, unless it’s covered by their insurance, which is why we have the standards of care set up the way they are.

Dr. Jay Richards (31:26):
Absolutely.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:26):
And gender affirming care is a “medical necessity.” That’s the term that insurance companies are looking for. This is a medical necessity. Then your insurance will pay for that $30,000 a year worth of treatment, or presumably Medicaid would pay for it if you’re an underserved individual, I guess, right? So somebody is cashing in to the tune of billions of dollars.

Dr. Jay Richards (31:57):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:57):
There were 42,000 children who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria last year, which would be three times as many as were diagnosed three years before that, and something like 15 times as many as were diagnosed three years before that.

Dr. Jay Richards (32:09):
It’s a massive explosion of kids presenting with these symptoms and now being treated in this way. I’d be the last person to say, this is all about the money, but incentives matter, and companies, if you produce one of these drugs, this is serious cash, serious money, and of course puberty blockers, at least in principle, those are going to just go on for a few years, still huge amount of money.

Think about the cross-ex hormones. So if you are a female that’s trying to transition to male, you’re on testosterone the rest of your life or estrogen in the case of a male transitioning to female, that is a lifelong customer. And so this idea that that incentive isn’t going to make any difference, I think is just incredibly naive.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to think, look, economic incentives matter, and we need to be looking at that at the moment. Unfortunately, we don’t exactly know, okay, how many Medicaid dollars are being spent on this? We don’t exactly know or a bunch of us trying to track that states have that information.

(33:13):
We’ll eventually know. But I’m certain at this point that it is definitely in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And once we find out, I mean we’re going to talk about, I’m quite certain we’re talking about a multi-billion dollar industry. In fact, Jeff, a few months ago, a financial analysis firm actually did an analysis about this growing industry. And the gist of the piece was that, hey, this is a big growth industry. There’s been massive year on y, year over year sort of increases in the customer base.

It’s this weird kind of enthusiasm like we’re talking about timeshares or something. We’re talking about gender transition surgery that sterilizes children, but nevertheless, it recognized that, gosh, there’s huge money to be made here. And so I think any complete description or history of what’s happening is going to have to take that into account.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:01):
Wow. When we say Medicaid, we have to remember that’s a government program to help people who are at a very low income level. But when you write your check to the United States Treasury every April 15th, the money that’s paying for these surgeries is coming from that.

Dr. Jay Richards (34:22):
That’s right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:23):
That’s tax dollars.

Dr. Jay Richards (34:23):
Exactly right. Yes, that’s right. And this is very hard for people to imagine how this happens, but say in the state of California, it’s actually fairly easy for a child to go to a judge, say, well, my parents don’t want me to be able to transition. The child can be declared, award of the state, and then suddenly they’re eligible for Medicaid.

So there’s actually a strong incentive in states like California for children to do that, to try to dissociate from their parents so that they can get Medicaid funding. I doubt very many people that are, as you said, paying their taxes faithfully on April the 15th, imagine that they are helping to underwrite these surgeries for kids.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:03):
Yeah. Alright, let’s talk about the laws for a moment. And we’ve got about 10 minutes left if that works for your schedule.

Dr. Jay Richards (35:11):
Sure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:11):
Okay. So I’ve seen some of the state laws trying to address the issue, especially as it goes toward attacking or mutilating children, and I’m using the term mutilating children, not as hyperbole, but that’s quite literally what’s happening. We’re using the pharmaceuticals and ultimately surgery, if the patient says they’re still not in their gender identity, they’ll go all the way towards surgeries to remove their sex organs and so forth. Okay.

So I’ve seen some state laws that I think, okay, that’s pretty good. I’ve seen others where I think, I’m not sure that’s going to stand up in court. And then of course we’ve got states like where I am in Colorado, so we have a conversion therapy law that prevents, this hasn’t been tested yet, but it theoretically would prevent a therapist from even recommending against gender affirming care. That would be against the law. If you’re a counselor, you could lose your license theoretically.

And again, it hasn’t been tested yet, but that’s what the law says. So we got all these complications. What are your recommendations on what people should do? I know there are some who are in a legislature who are viewers of the show.

Dr. Jay Richards (36:33):
Yeah, no, exactly. And the temptation, I mean, what I know I can read my own introspectively. I know my own response when I first realized this stuff was going on is one of just outrage. What can I do? And so legislators that are upset about this, they think, okay, well let’s just criminalize this and throw the doctors in jail to do this. That’s the kind of instinct. I totally get that.

But I think you got to look at a couple of things. You’ve got to look first at the constitutionality of particular ways of responding and then look at what courts, and that is, judges, are going to have to deal with at the moment. And so remember any judge that, let’s say you have a law that criminalizes as say the state of Alabama did, criminalizes makes it a class C felony in the case of Alabama.

(37:16):
These procedures, so especially the drugs and the surgery in particular, it’s going to come before a judge and a judge is going to hear testimony from the American Medical Association, Pediatric Endocrine Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, on and on and on, telling him this is what the science says, this is the best medicine, this is the proper response. And then the judge is going to say, okay, but the gentleman for Tuscaloosa thinks that this should be illegal. Right?

Well, you kind of can tell whatever the kind of, my lawyer friends hate it when I say this, but look, whatever the constitutional details are, you kind of can guess how that’s going to turn out. The judge is going to say, well, I don’t know anything about this. And surely it’s up to the medical authorities to say what the standard of care should be.

(37:59):
Now that’s incredibly naive. It misses the fact that these organizations have been captured by an ideology, but that’s the reality. And so any good law is going to, I think, be framed to take account of that. I honestly think the best state in terms of dealing with this has been the state of Florida. The legislature actually avoided dealing with the medicine. Initially.

What they did is they passed a law called the Parental Rights and Education bill last year. That’s a bill that basically insists on transparency and accountability for schools and allows parents to sue schools if they secretly transition their kids.

Then the State Board of Health appointed by Governor DeSantis issued their own report under their own review of the evidence in their own hearings and said, okay, there’s no good evidence of this. We’re not spending Medicaid dollars on it. Same thing that happened a few months ago with their boards of medicine and osteopathic medicine. So in other words, it’s the medical authorities ruling on this.

(38:52):
Now the legislature comes in and says, we’re going to prohibit this. No judge is going to be able to say, well, it’s all the scientists against a bunch of politicians. He’s going to say, well, there’s a disagreement and the legislature’s now acting consistent with its own medical authorities. Other states can’t do that. They just don’t have the arrangement that Florida has a last make a merit of America, Florida already. I mean, that’s my preferred motto these days, honestly.

And so in those cases, what states should really do is try to restrict this in a way that’s not going to be overly draconian and criminalized. So go after medical licenses, prohibit these things, but don’t criminalize them. Create a private right of action for the victims. So in other words, make sure that kids and their parents who undergo these treatments can sue later.

And then as in some laws like the law in Arkansas, which is again being litigated, but what it did is it said, we’re going to give the victims a 20 year increase in the statute of limitations after their 18th birthday so that they can sue if they realize later, look when they’re 30, this was a disaster.

(39:56):
That changes the incentives. Notice the police aren’t involved. We haven’t criminalized all of a sudden the insurance companies and the clinics and the doctors that are going to do this, like, huh, I could get sued 30 years from now for this. Trust me, that’s going to change the incentives. And so that’s a clever legislative way of avoiding the difficult details at the moment.

Now, I honestly think 15 years from now, these clinics are going to get sued. They’re going to get sued in class action lawsuits, and culturally we’ll realize this was a disaster. The question is how do we limit the damage right now legislatively? And that requires a kind of subtlety in which being careful in the way you frame these laws, I think is absolutely crucial.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:36):
Yeah. Well, I appreciate that so much. And I didn’t realize that last aspect about the statute of limitations because that’s what I’ve been telling legislators when they ask me, say, well your statute of limitations on this kind of care is probably three years. So by the time a child experiences the harms, the doctors are no longer in a position of being able to be held liable.

Dr. Jay Richards (40:59):
Exactly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:00):
So if you increase that to 15 years, or in the case you just mentioned 20 years, then they have to think, am I really telling the truth when I say, no, no, no. This is perfectly safe.

Dr. Jay Richards (41:12):
Yes, don’t worry. Never going to regret it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:13):
You’re never going to regret it. So say, okay, fine, doctor, I’m going to hold you to that 20 years from now. If I regret it, you and I are going to meet again.

Dr. Jay Richards (41:22):
That’s right. It really colds their bluff. I mean, because we know what’s going on. This is not that complicated of an issue. We know what’s happening. We have ideological capture of medical organizations. That’s happened before. This is a redo of the eugenics controversy of a century ago, which by the way, was endorsed by the Supreme Court of the United States.

So it’s not like this can’t happen, it’s just that this is the eugenics catastrophe of the 21st century, and it’s happening in the same way, and fortunately we have historical precedent, I think, to know how to deal with it, but let’s deal with it more quickly than we did in the case of eugenics.

Dr. Jeff Myers (41:55):
Yeah. Well, there’ve been all sorts of things through time that were thought to be medical breakthroughs. The guy who invented the lobotomy got a Nobel Prize for that, and then now we realize that it was a medical horror. It was a medical scandal, but there are 50,000 people who were irreversibly harmed and even killed in the process. Right. So is it your sense that you just said this, you think this is the medical scandal, the 21st century? I mean, we kind of went through that pretty quickly, but that’s a very strong statement.

Dr. Jay Richards (42:31):
It is. It is. I’m absolutely confident of this now because there are two things happening. There’s the scandal of the medicine, which is a manifestation of gender ideology. I think that is going to be seen as a scandal. There’s the ideology, which is a different thing. Just as, okay, kind of materialist Darwinism and social Darwinism inspired eugenics.

We realized eugenics was a disaster and it was a pseudoscience. It didn’t mean everybody, the culture, rethought Darwinism per se. In the same way I think the medicalization of this is going to be seen to be a catastrophe. The evidence is going to just come out overwhelmingly against it, but it’s going to be the work of a generation, I think, to undo the damage of the broader ideology and its infiltration or institutions.

Dr. Jeff Myers (43:13):
This is sort of an odd question that I wanted to ask. So in international diplomacy, say you’re moving toward war with another country, and the other country realizes we don’t want to do this. We don’t want to fight, but we can’t back down now because we’ll lose face. A good diplomat would try to figure out how to help them back down without losing face.

Is there a way for people who have maybe because of their political ideology or whatever, have instinctively embraced this gender ideology and are now realizing they would like to be able to back down? Is there a way to help them save face or is that just?

Dr. Jay Richards (43:52):
I hope so. No, I hope so. And I do think, I mean, Jeff, this is the thing that’s hopeful about because unlike say, the marriage debate, which really was sort of social conservatives against a drift of culture, this issue brings together very diverse people. You have Marxists that don’t like this, because on the corporate side, you have atheists and evolutionary biologists. They can be atheists, but they believe in biology, they believe in mammalian biology. They hate this stuff.

You have feminists that don’t like the fact that men are competing against women in professional and college sports. They hate this stuff. And so there’s kind of a diverse coalition. And so for people that are, say over on the left politically, there’s no reason why you have to cease to be a progressive to just say, look, we shouldn’t be telling kids they can be born in the wrong bodies.

(44:39):
There’s nothing about your political ideology that requires that you’ve gotten contingently attached to this particular thing, and you don’t need to. I mean, honestly, if we had asked 40 years ago how this was going to happen politically, I don’t know that I would’ve been able to guess, okay, how did this work out politically? I would not have imagined it would end up as partisan as it is.

And then notice that the countries that were ahead of us, the uk, Finland, and Sweden, and then probably Belgium and France, no one thinks those are right wing countries. They’ve already had second thoughts and started slowing down. And so clearly it’s possible to look at the evidence and not be a conservative Christian and to realize this is a bad idea and you should be able to do it too. That’s what I would tell people that look, aren’t going to sign on to my full political package.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:28):
Yeah. Well, that’s really wise, Jay. Thank you, man. The last 45 minutes have really advanced this discussion a lot and clarified a lot of my own thinking, and I’m glad to hear both from the parents’ perspective, from the educators education perspective, the theological perspective, but also the legislative, that there is a role, laws are there to protect justice and to stand against evil. So Jay, thanks so much for your work and thanks for your time on the show today.

Dr. Jay Richards (45:55):
My pleasure, Jeff. Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Jeff Myers (45:58):
Thanks to my guest today, Dr. Jay Richards, for joining the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. You can find out more about Jay Richards by looking at the work that he’s doing on the transgender issue at the Heritage Foundation. Just Google that Heritage Foundation, I think it’s heritage.org.

Psalm 1:39 says, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. We need this generation of children to know they were not born in the wrong body. God has made them in his image and wants them to be the kind of person who can really be courageous and thoughtful and stand for truth in this time. Thanks for joining the show.

Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place for your listening enjoyment. You can download it at edifi.app. Be sure to share the show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review if you would, on the site where you download the show that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.