100 Years of Transgender Medicine: What History Reveals | Patrick Hahn

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. This show is for men and women who are exhausted, inflamed, living with brain fog, gut or skin issues, and who won't settle for answers like your labs are normal or just take this pill. Here we focus on the root causes of disease and on what I call repair deficit, the gap between what your body needs for optimal health and performance and what it's actually getting. This podcast is not personal medical advice. It is education to help you ask better questions so you can make better decisions about your health. Thank you for joining us and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone. Dr. Stillman here. Today I am joined by Patrick Hahn. He is a lecturer, researcher, and author of several books. His bent, I think it's safe to say, is telling the truth about abuses in medicine by people in power. And today we are going to be talking about the realities of the transgender agenda and sex changes for children, let alone adults, hormone therapy. And I feel it's necessary for me to give a little bit of a preamble on why we're talking about this on a podcast that's titled Integrative Medicine with Dr. Stillman. And the reason is this: for a long time, medicine became very apolitical, and doctors kind of left that at home or, or just didn't engage in politics. And the next thing we knew, medicine was very political., and it was being used by political actors to further political agendas. And the doctors got totally blindsided. And the next thing you know, medicine is this kind of monstrosity that patients are afraid of their doctors, patients are afraid of their institutions. And I was just shocked in the last 10 years to see institutions that I'd grown up respecting and reading their literature and their journals and thinking these are places where really smart, learned people go to do smart, learned, and ethical things. And see them in their online education, like women are no longer women. It's not breastfeeding, it's chest feeding. It's people who identify as whatever. I mean, just all common sense went out the window. And for people who don't know, in integrative medicine, we do a lot of work with hormones and we do a lot of work with sex and gender. And this episode for the record is not safe for little ears. So if you're listening to this with kids or whatever, put in your headphones or save it for later, because this is going to get into very adult and very potentially difficult topics, you may not want to listen at all. But I do want this podcast to be bold in tackling the political issues of our time because I don't see enough clinicians doing that. And I think it's a gross disservice to the public. And so we're going to do it and we're going to talk about it because it also has a lot of implications for how you guys get your care, even if you never consider this and don't have a particular interest in it. So, all right, Patrick, anything you want to add to that?

Yeah, I wanted to tell our audience, I have no training in medicine. I was trained as an evolutionary biologist. About 20 years ago, I became interested in the matter of iatrogenic harm. I was just appalled by this cancer-like growth of our medical establishment.

How did you come to become convinced of this, that this was a problem?

Well, as an evolutionary biologist, two things are, uh, obvious to me. One is we evolved to thrive, to be strong and healthy.

Mm-hmm.

The second is we evolved to thrive for a time and then to die and get the hell outta the way of the next generation. And, um, the, it was like falling down a rabbit hole. The more I looked into this, the more I got originally Uh, my first 3 books were about psychiatry. My first book was a history of psychiatric genetics. Spoiler alert, there is no gene for mental illness.

Hmm.

My second book was on antidepressants, suicide, and violence. And my third book was on the drugs that are given for something called ADHD, which isn't even a real disorder. It's just a diagnostic label that was invented to justify foisting as many stimulant drugs on children and now adults as possible. And, uh, my second and third books were published by Sami Staat, uh, Health Writers Cooperative, which was run by Dr. David Healy, who has been writing on iatrogenic harm and psychiatric harm for decades now. And then COVID struck, and I just watched as everything that allowed us to thrive as a community of intelligent, self-governing men and women—work, school, church, entrepreneurship, outdoor exercise, fresh air, love, friendship, conviviality—all these things were relentlessly demonized. And in place, we were offered shame, blame, snitching, cattling and a climate of fear that pervaded every facet of our existence. And when Dr. Healy asked me, this was a crisis that touched on every facet of our existence. Going from writing about antidepressants and stimulants to writing about the COVID is like going from swimming laps in a pool to being parachuted in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So when Dr. Healy asked me to write a book on the COVID shots, I agreed immediately. And this project took on a personal tone that none of my previous ones had. Early in the course of writing the book, I was out walking and I suffered an ischemic stroke and had to be rushed to the hospital. This was less than 30 days after the booster shot, which I took on pain of losing my livelihood if I didn't. And so for my latest major project, I have chosen to write a practice commonly known as gender-affirming care, or as I prefer to call it, the child maiming industry. Uh, this is iatrogenic harm run wild. There is nothing good about this industry. It's all harm. It's all based on lies.

When I think about this topic, I can't help but think, how did this happen? And I want you to tell us the story, because I remember growing up and boys were boys and girls were girls, and we had separate bathrooms and locker rooms, and you would never dream of going into the girls' locker room. That would just— I mean, you might, you might not survive. Your reputation certainly would not survive, even if your physical body did. And God forbid a dad of one of those girls got a hold of you. You might— anyway, you get the idea. And just the thought that doctors and nurses and surgical techs and operating room schedulers and receptionists And all the other people involved in the machinery of taking a patient to a major surgery or just prescribing a hormone-blocking drug would all be in on this. And no one would say, hey, wait a minute, this is just a little boy or a little girl who's confused. I mean, it's so shocking to me. Any rational human being knows you can't even let the child pick what they want for breakfast. They'll pick the worst thing for them because it tastes good in the box. It looks attractive because it was designed by really highly paid advertisers who know how to make kids want to eat the food. So how did this happen? Where did it come from in America, in the Western— in Western civilization in general? Because I've been also shocked by— this is not a local phenomenon. It seems to have swept through the entire Western Europe and the United States all at the same time.

Yes, my book traces the history of this movement from the beginning. The first quote-unquote vaginoplasties on men were performed in Germany at the Institute for Sex Research in Berlin almost just over 100 years ago. But this didn't really take off until after World War II. And the history of this field is an unbroken record of failure going back 70 years. The name Elmer Belt is almost forgotten now, but he was one of the founding fathers of UCLA Medicine. So this guy was no fly-by-night nobody, and he was also one of the first docs in America, maybe the first, to perform so-called vaginoplasties on men. And guess what happened?

So, and I confess my ignorance, I did not learn about it in medical school, but a vaginoplasty is when you try to construct a vagina out of what's left when you remove a man's penis.

Is that correct? Yes. Yeah. Yes. The doctor amputates the penis and makes a slit in your perineal muscle and uses his fingers to, uh, dig a hole through the connective tissue that separates the prostate and the bladder from the rectum. And then he will line this wound that he has gouged with skin taken from the penis or taken from elsewhere in the body, or a segment of the colon or fish skin. If anybody thinks I'm joking about that last one, All I have to say is I wish I were. They've been doing this since the '50s.

How is it still going on?

Yeah, well, the— it's, it's been— the history of this field is a history of an unbroken record of failure. Hmm. As I mentioned, Elmer Belt was one of the first doctors in the United States to perform these surgeries. And guess what happened? He became disgusted with these men. He became disgusted with what he was doing, and he stopped doing it. Let's fast forward ahead to the 1960s. The first gender identity clinic in the United States was founded at Johns Hopkins University right here in Baltimore, and its founding director was a man named John Hoopes, and his successor was a man named John Meyer. And guess what happened? They became disgusted with these men. They became disgusted with what they were doing. Their own study failed to show any objectively measurable improvement in psychosocial functioning in these men, and they shut down the clinic. Now, I want everyone listening to this to reflect on how extraordinary this is. The founding fathers of an entire branch of medicine admitted the whole thing was a mistake. A wrong turn in human history. Now let's fast forward ahead to the 1980s. Uh, the Gender Identity Clinic in the Netherlands performed a study of all the subjects who had received sex reassignment surgery. And again, their own study failed to show any objectively measurable improvement in psychosocial functioning in these individuals. So did they say, well, oops, guess the whole thing was a mistake? No, they did not. They said, well, what if we corral these people into the gender identity clinic while they still are children, even though by their own admission they had no way of knowing which children might benefit from the surgery and which would not? And so that was the beginning. And by their own admission, most gender discordant children outgrow this obsession. And they usually outgrow it right around puberty, right around the time those pleasurable feelings kick in.

And those hormones that define, that define sex. And I, I think this is really important because we prescribe bioidentical hormones, the hormones that make men, men and women, women every day in practice. Patients love them. They feel better. They often lose weight and have more energy and sleep better. And they are truly, I think, life-giving medications. And I really. I mean, I'm actually really curious. So you opened this by saying you're an evolutionary biologist. I was trained to believe in evolution in my biology, and I'll never forget taking Ecology Biology 207 with Robert Askins at Connecticut College. It was actually very much a formative experience because I think that the ideas behind how species are selected is really interesting and also just inarguable, right? You see a trait in an environment that gives you a competitive advantage. Course, that individual or, or group on balance, not every single one of them, has more offspring. The offspring are more successful, and that's why you have such different varieties of people in different places. Like, I don't think it's a coincidence that people— that European peoples and, and East Asian peoples dominate at the Olympics in diving and swimming. Like, there's a survival and a serious advantage to being or having a body type that allows you to swim quickly through the water when you're living in the most water-abundant places on Earth. But I digress. My question to you, because I really, over the last several years in particular, I really looked at the amount of evil in the world and I said, the animals are not doing this. They're not even close. I really don't believe in evolution anymore. And I absolutely believe that this is just the worst kind of demonic and satanic agenda. Because how do you fit this into an evolutionary framework?

Yeah, it's funny you should mention that. For the majority of my life, I believed that religious people were superstitious idiots. Yeah. Yeah. And in what feels like it was several lifetimes ago, I had great interest in behavioral ecology or selfish gene theory or evolutionary social psychology, whatever you want to call it. And I had this vague idea that this could serve as the basis for a rational system of ethics without having to believe in all that silly superstitious junk our grandparents believed in. And, but try as I might, if I try to base an ethical system on Darwinism, I can get no further than Mein Kampf or dog eat dog or nature red in tooth and claw. Again, whatever you wanna call it. And yet I have always felt in my bones that this cannot be all there is. We crawled out of the slime, but we are called upon to be more than that.

Yeah, I definitely don't believe in the, in crawling out of the slime, but we can agree to disagree. Yeah. Well, I, the next thing I want to talk about is because we prescribe these hormones and we see them providing all this benefit for our patients. And I got much deeper into my faith as a result of all the wickedness that arose over the last several years, which really defied anything I could have possibly imagined. This being maybe, I think, the most heinous example, the mutilation of children. And not just the mutilation of children. I just don't think people realize, like, these hormones make us who we are. And as I was reading the Bible, I couldn't help but be struck by the fact that God has these little tells in the Old and the New Testament that he really cares about gender. One of them is that in ancient Israel, one of his stipulations is that men who've been castrated cannot enter the temple. For some reason, they're not allowed to engage in a normal way as a man in civic life, which I just think is there's not much comment. There's almost no commentary other than that made. There's no commentary on why this is. There's no commentary on what God thinks about it. But it's really clear that God has a reason for, A, making male and female. B, the hormones that make us male and female— I think this is so interesting, right? They're encoded into the genome in such a way where our, our actual chromosomes differ. And then what happens as we get older and in puberty, right, is that these levels of these change dramatically. So men have testosterone levels that are hundreds of times the levels of women, or whatever, but they also still have the hormones that make women, women, estrogen and progesterone. They just have very small quantities of them. And what I've found fascinating about practicing with these molecules is that patients will come back to me and say, I'm a better father. I'm a better husband. I've heard things like, I'm more patient with people. Like people have these experiences of, of changes in their character. They're like their personal moral character. I'm not talking about, I can lift heavier weights in the gym. I'm not talking about, I sleep through the night. I'm a better person based on my moral framework taking bioidentical hormones than I was before, which is part of why I'm such an evangelist for them. And part of why I always feel a little bit sad when patients say, well, I don't know, I'm scared of the risks. I'm like, look, it's great. This is really, really good medicine. I really wouldn't recommend it unless I really firmly, firmly believe that. And I saw it every day in clinical practice, patients getting great results, feeling better, functioning better, and better able to fulfill their their role in the world. We're called to something higher, even if you believe we've crawled out of the slime, right? What does that mean? Like, to me as a doctor, I think that's the most important question for me to ask with, with patients and help them answer, because that allows us then to direct our therapeutics to help them achieve that goal. And when I think about how these children's lives are being destroyed, it's just hard to express what a great disservice this is. And I'm also very aggrieved that there's not more opposition to this, even in secular society where people don't necessarily share my views on creation or the Bible. What are your thoughts on all that?

Yeah, I mentioned that, uh, most historically, most gender discordant children outgrew it and they usually outgrew it around puberty. The cure for gender dysphoria in children is puberty. Why do you think they want to give gender dysphoric children puberty blockers? Think about it. What's so bad about puberty blockers? They stunt normal human growth and development. Mm-hmm. That is not a side effect. That is what blocking puberty means. And you cannot interfere with the normal development of the sex organs without interfering with a lot of other things as well. These drugs cause muscle wasting, bone loss, brain damage, uh, testicular cancer, liver cancer. All these are documented effects of puberty blockers and wrong sex hormones. There was case history I just read. Uh, it's not in my book, but I, I just read it like the other day. Boy was given puberty blockers and his IQ dropped 15 points. Now, 15 points could be the difference between going to college and not going to college, or living on your own and not living on your own. This is monstrous and we're going to put a stop to this.

Yeah, I absolutely agree. I'm very curious what your thoughts are having reviewed all of this history of this. I've long been interested in the effects of hormone-disrupting compounds in our water, our air, our food. And I've noticed, and everyone I talk to, everyone, everyone I think with a brain and a functional central nervous system, even a remotely functional central nervous system, has noticed that men are less masculine and women are, if they're still feminine, there, there's something very aggressive that we're seeing now that certainly would, is not, I think, historically the norm. Let's just put it that way. And people will come up with different explanations for that, like the oppressor-oppressed narrative on the left, but I'm really fascinated by this historical example of a, a doctor named Pottinger, Francis Marion Pottinger in, in, in California. He did these studies with cats where he malnourished some cats and then he fed other cats a rich natural diet. And he found that as they got older, the, and as they had successive generations, what happened to the, to the cats that were malnourished, and specifically he didn't feed them terrible food. He fed them food that humans would eat, pasteurized milk, very cooked burnt meat where all the nutrients or all the B vitamins have been denatured. And what he found was that these these cats that were malnourished by this processed food diet would gradually develop more and more allergies and autoimmune conditions, and they would develop thyroid problems, and then they would develop facial malformations, and they would get crowded teeth, and they would develop early osteoporosis and bone abnormalities. And then there would be increased rates of fetal loss, and there would be increased rates of infertility. And very interestingly, he noticed in the behavior of the animals that the females became more vicious and cruel. They would hiss and claw at the handlers. They would bite the handlers, and the males became more passive and less and less aggressive. So less, I would say, masculine. Now, he contrasted that with the animals that he properly nourished with raw milk, unpasteurized milk, and raw meat, which is obviously a cat's natural diet. The cats are not out there starting fires and boiling their milk, let alone grilling their meat to death. And he found that the cats had these lustrous coats. They had tons of litters of healthy, happy little kittens, and they, kittens were friendly and the female cats were friendly and the male cats were, they were, they were appropriately masculine. Like there was normal male competitive behavior. You look at any, any species like deer. Why do the males have antlers? They lock them and they fight each other for the women. Bulls, name a mammal, you'll, you'll see an example of men competing. And I like to think in modern society, this has turned into men like sharpening each other, becoming smarter and stronger and tougher, by engaging in good faith competition, not blood sport and mortal combat. But I look at that and I think I have literally watched this happen in my lifetime. The women are less fertile. There's countless examples of women getting more and more aggressive and angry and negative in society. Men have become totally neutered and castrated. And I think the fact that there's been so little pushback on this is, I would argue, exhibit A that this is really happening in the public at large. Have you ever looked into any of this or do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, you raise a lot of interesting points. I don't know much about endocrine disruptors. I can tell you I spent 4 years in Ghana and I've been back a number of times since. And every time I go there, what strikes me is how healthy the people there look. No surplus body fat, and they're by no means emaciated, strong, Lithe bodies, clear skin, bright eyes, beautiful straight white teeth. And they eat vegetables, fruits, root, lots of root vegetables, free-range chicken. That's the only kind they have there. Yeah. Free-range beef. That's the only kind they have there. Yeah. And as they switch to Western habits and eat a Western diet, they tend to get kind of boxy looking in their middle ages, but Yeah. Still nothing like what you see in America. Every time I drive down a street, I see these young people with their whole lives ahead of them, just morbid obesity. Not one, I know, or two, but one after another, after another. What a waste of being young.

Quick pause. If you're listening to this and thinking, he's talking about me, I'm tired, foggy, inflamed, and it feels like no one can figure out why, then your next step is not another a random protocol. It's a structured assessment with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Pick a time that works for you and add it to your calendar. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a promise of cure. It's a calm, structured way to stop guessing and see whether our approach is right for you. We have a limited number of these appointments each month. If this conversation is hitting close to home, visit stillmanmd.com now and book a call with myself or a member of my team. Thank you for listening. Now back to the episode. I have to tell you something. We're seeing in clinical practice more and more young men and women whose hormones are inexplicably abnormal. Classic example would be a 20-something-year-old male comes into the office. Some reason he's sought medical care and he's overweight. He's, we say it's pear-shaped. Which is the adipose distribution that you get when your testosterone's low, never been very athletic, probably plays a lot of video games or spends a lot of time on the screen, particularly late at night, probably doesn't have a very healthy diet. But these guys will come in and their testosterone levels will be in the basement. I mean, we're talking 80-year-old male levels of testosterone. And I can't help but wonder, is this starting now in utero? Because what we have noticed also as well in the last 20 or so years that we've been really watching the data, the incidence of congenital abnormalities of male genitalia has risen. What does that mean? So there's a certain number of men— used to be a very, very, very small proportion, but this proportion has grown— they would have an improperly formed penis, they would have incomplete descended testicles, so their testicles wouldn't have fully come out of the body. And thank God we have surgical recourse for these men. These men are not doomed to having dysfunctional or nonfunctional genitalia for the rest of their lives. And that's part of what so horrifies and infuriates me about this gender craze, is that we've spent such a long time and so much suffering and time and energy, let alone money that's gone in just being able to help people have the genitalia they were born with fully functional. And these people are totally erasing that for kids who are totally healthy. But I wonder to myself, are these kids getting this gender dysphoria? Is the transgenderism— is it all linked back to these endocrine disrupting compounds and artificial light at night and electromagnetic radiations that affect how the brain functions? We see it in clinical practice all the time. People feel better when we help them mitigate, minimize, and reduce their exposure to these things and properly nourish their bodies so that— because that's the other piece of it, is that the toxins will— you need nutrients in order to neutralize the toxins or cope with them. I'm just curious, did any of this come up in your research on this, like why this craze has really taken off recently? And maybe the better question for you is, has this been here the whole time and am I making it up that it's gotten worse in the last few years, or, or has it really gotten worse in the last few years? Because I, I don't think most people realize this has a 100-year history at this point.

Yeah, you raise a lot of good points. One thing about the whole field of gender medicine is it's characterized by ever-shifting goalposts, ever-shifting definitions of words. One of the things they're fond of saying is transgender people have always been with us. And I guess there's a sense in which that could be said to be true. The anthropological literature is full of examples of cultures in which a tiny number of boys or men dress as girls or women, present as girls and women. Guess what? These boys and men are not venerated. They are despised, degraded, downtrodden, prostituted, uh, laughed at and cast aside on the slag heap. Uh, this is not a good place to be. And now we are manufacturing cases of this condition on an industrial scale. Yeah, I— the, the estimated prevalence of this condition has gone up by 3 orders of magnitude in just the past 50 years. If this were anything other than a manufactured epidemic, you would think our public health authorities would be moving heaven and earth to find out what is causing it. They're not doing that because they know perfectly well what's causing it. They're causing it.

I agree. I still remain convinced that it is also about nutrient depletion in the diet, endocrine hormone disrupting compounds, stresses that disrupt the body in this way. One thing that I think is very important for people to know is that this is going to have far-reaching implications for these people over the course of their life because the hormones protect us from disease and degeneration. The simplest way I explain hormones to patients is hormones are what keep us from getting little and old. And that's really as near the truth in a single sentence as I can, as I can bring it. And what that means is that if you're going to, first of all, remove the hormone-producing tissues, the ovaries in women, the testicles in men, you are going to invite disease into that body that will not respond to anything but replacement of those hormones, which of course creates a perpetual customer for, for the pharmaceutical industry and for clinics. Because even if they about-face and say, well, I wish I hadn't done that. Now I'd like to have testosterone so I can be a man. Or likewise, like, I'd like to have female hormones so I can be a woman. Well, some of the surgery obviously cannot be, cannot be reversed, but at least you can give them back the hormones that make them who they are biologically supposed to be. You will still face years and years and years of disease that could have been prevented just by not harming the patient. And that's what's so, I think, despicable about this is that it's so overtly a case of harm of the patient. And it's also, I think, part of this broader narrative of— that I see in conventional medicine, which is this total lack of respect for the power of these hormones to prevent disease. And also, I would argue, to treat it, because we can't tell you how many patients come in and it's like, oh, I'm on a painkiller and I'm on a sleep med and I'm on a medication that gives me energy during the day or helps me focus for my ADHD, whatever that is. I've got this drug and I've got that drug, and I'm like, you have low thyroid hormone. And will replace 5 to 10 drugs with one bioidentical hormone because the body is just dying for that hormone and the gland that produces it has been burned out, not properly nourished, poisoned, you name it. The point is you'll get these people better and well with the hormones. And so anything that gets in the way of this is going to degrade public health. And I know what's going to happen to these people. You mentioned societies cast these people onto— you called it the slag heap, and I don't think that's inaccurate. I think it's totally accurate. And unfortunately, I think what will then happen is they will all end up on Medicaid and that eventually they'll end up on Medicare and disability, and society will be paying for these people who could have been productive, healthy, happy members of society if they just hadn't walked into the wrong clinic and had the wrong doctor with this crazy agenda. What do you think about that?

Yes, I agree. Our rulers are reflexively in favor of anything that makes people weaker, sicker, broke, confused, gullible, and dependent on government handouts. Yeah, I agree completely. It increases their power and privilege, but as a society, we're all poorer because of it. I know.

Yeah. So what do you think the solution is to this problem?

Uh, we need to shut this industry down. It should be a crime. To tell a child you're born in the wrong body. It should be a crime to poison a child with puberty blockers or wrong-sex hormones. It should be a crime to amputate a healthy young girl's breasts. As for the adults, society should do nothing to enable this obsession. We should tell these people, if, if you had this foisted upon you as a child, we will spare no expense in trying to help you. If you choose this lifestyle as an adult, we're not going to do anything to enable it. We're not going to fit the bill for these fantastically expensive body modifications. We're not going to falsify your identity papers, and we're sure as heck not going to allow you in female-only spaces where women and girls are found, often found naked and vulnerable. And you talked about men being emasculated. The fact that men have tolerated this, I would say, is proof of your point. We need to shut the whole thing down. Now, if these mutilations be a good idea, just about everything I thought I knew about being human must be wrong. Now, we all have to face the possibility we could be wrong. Well, of course, if somebody has the cash, they will still be able to find a doctor somewhere in the world willing to do these things to them. And if we ever see some kind of miraculous improvement in these men, then I'll have to revisit my position. But we never have. 50 years of outcome studies have produced nothing but an unbroken record of spectacular failure.

And this is something that really frustrates me about the whole problem is that I'm in integrative medicine. It's what I've always wanted to do. It's what I've always done. I've always been fascinated by it. And a lot of what we do does not have a strong evidence base. You look at the institutions like the NIH, and I was once upon a time on track to be a research scientist in a medical university, and I just gave up on it because I was just so disillusioned with the types of studies we were doing. They were not helping patients. And the things I wanted to do to help patients was like, well, you can't get funding for that. And here's the reality I've, I've realized is I'm actually in a better position to do research in private practice because of how I've run the practice than I ever was in academia. I just have to find the time to actually do it. But my point is we have all this stuff that patients rave about. They're very happy with it. It's really good. There's a great evidence base and it's, it's considered fringe by the medical boards. It's considered malpractice. You can lose your license for doing something you've properly consented the patient for. You can be dragged into court by the plaintiff's attorneys, malpractice lawyers. You can have your reputation dragged through the mud. I mean, this happens and it really does happen to colleagues of mine. And we're doing everything we can to properly consent. There's often no harm. I've had colleagues lose their licenses for without a single patient complaint. It was that the medical board looked at what they did and they said, well, you used that off-label, or well, this wasn't indicated in this case. Right. And it's so disturbing to me that these people have been able to get away with this colossal abuse of children and make money on it. I mean, these people are making money off of this. It's so disturbing and it's so infuriating, and the medical boards don't even seem to care. What is the point of having a medical board if they don't stop psychopaths from mutilating children? I used to be much more of a free speech absolutist, and in some ways, like for example, I don't think we should have medical boards. I think they're totally insane. It's just a, it's just a classic abuse of power And it's just, they're all destined and doomed to be corrupted. But one thing I'm no longer a free speech absolutist on is exactly what you just said. You, it should be a crime to tell a child they were born in the wrong body and that they should undergo a sex change surgery. And I think it's madness to allow adults to go through this, even if they're consenting, even if they're fully aware of their rights and so on. It's just, there's no benefit to any of this. And in integrative medicine, I was saying, we often don't have a lot of evidence for what we do, but we do it because patients love it because there's no apparent downside. These people have studies showing that what they're doing is damaging the patient, and they won't even acknowledge it. They just keep going like the insane demonic people that they are. Yes. So I'm curious now, we, we see what the problem is, we know we need to do— do you see the political will coalescing anywhere to put a stop to this? Because I see what I see happening is these hospitals are cleaning up, they're making tons and tons and tons of money off of this, and they don't want to shut down these cash cow surgery centers. I know how that is. They make a lot of money on a lot of margin on cosmetic. I mean, you could call it cosmetic surgeries like this. And I don't see any real consequences coming. And this is something that I really, I really wonder about. Like, I don't, I don't see how it's ethical to hold like a hospital CEO unaccountable for this. There need to be real consequences for these people. So I'm curious, we agree on what needs to be done, at least in principle. I'm curious, do you see this actually happening? What's going to happen with this?

Well, I think the tide has turned. A number of states have passed— I'm relieved to hear you say that— banning so-called gender-affirming care for children. And I believe Medicare and Medicaid will no longer fund this for children or adults. We may never completely eliminate it. As I said, if somebody has the cash, they will be able to find a doc somewhere in the world willing to do these things to him. But we need to drive this as far to the margins of society as possible. And I think this will happen. I think COVID was the tipping point because not everybody is affected by antidepressants. Not everybody's affected by ADHD drugs. We were all affected by COVID hysteria. Everybody in the country, everybody in the world. And that's why I, I no longer see the divide between liberal and conservative, or right and left. There are those of us who value human life and works, and those who do not. That, to me, is the defining issue of our era.

I totally agree. One last thing that's occurred to me I should ask you. I don't know if you ran into this in your research at all. As I got deeper and deeper into reading the Bible and spending time around Christians, I found more and more people testifying to their sexual identity, they may have been attracted to women, or like, they may be a woman attracted to a woman, they may have been a man attracted to men, saying that their sexuality, or their, perhaps their desire to have a family, to have children or not have children, was changed by their religious experience, which in medical schools called conversion therapy, the idea that someone can go from being gay to straight, and is considered by the medical establishment to be totally debunked, pseudoscientific, impossible. But what I found compelling about this is that I looked on Wikipedia, which is usually the place where all of the studies that confirm the liberal progressive worldview can be found. There is not, to my knowledge, a single— and I don't know how you would study this, to be totally clear, so I'm not saying that— I, again, I don't— I don't know how you would do it, so I don't know if I'm faulting anyone for not having done it. But I'm just curious, did you run into any literature in researching this about the role of religion in protecting people from, or changing people's thoughts about their gender or their sexual preferences? Yes, I did.

There was an interesting case history back in the '70s of a young man who decided he wanted to be a woman, and he went to the gender identity clinic and got his female hormones, and he was living as a woman, and then he just disappeared for a time, and then he came back dressed in a three-piece suit, exhibiting consistently masculine behaviors, and he told them that he had undergone an exorcism. And his desire to be a woman disappeared.

This is exactly what I have heard.

Some may find that treatment modality bizarre. Whether future generations will find it more bizarre than this program of poisoning and surgical mutilation that currently is the standard of care remains to be seen. Also, for the book, I talked to a fellow named Will Allen, and he transitioned and lived as a woman for 31 years. And as a young man, he was, I guess, some kind of tech profession. He was kind of vague, but he worked in, in tech and he was making excellent money. He was married to a beautiful girl who wanted nothing more than to stay home and raise his children while he brought home the bacon. And he threw it all away to chase this impossible dream. And he lived as a woman for 31 years and he succeeded in passing as a woman. He dated men, although he told me he never had any sexual attraction to a man. One man fell in love with him, and when he revealed who he really was, the other man, not surprisingly, was horrified and broke off all contact. And two days later called him back and said, "I still love you." And Will said to this man, "Forget it." He didn't want to be with anyone who would be crazy enough to want to be with him. So he lived as a woman for 31 years, and after his father died, he returned to his hometown to settle the estate. And he attended church and felt the Holy Spirit washing over him in waves. And he said, my eyes just opened, all the harm I had done to people. And, uh, he's a very smart guy. He could have had a great life, but he didn't. And very engaging chap. There were parts of that interview where we were both laughing. Mm. But neither of us was laughing when he told us how this affected his father. He said, I destroyed Batman.

Wow. So yeah. Was his father particularly religious?

Uh, yes. Yeah. They went to church. By the way, he said he had a great childhood. Mm-hmm. He said he couldn't ask for anything better. Yeah.

It's like you can't help but wonder. I can only imagine those parents pray for those kids every day. I suppose it would be, uh, fitting that he converted after his father's death. Uh, even if, of course, it's so sad about all the harm and suffering along the way. So I'll leave you with this and I'm curious if, again, you, you got into this at all in your research. When I was growing up, I assume it was the same for you. I didn't see a difference in the birth rate left and right. Democrats had kids, Republicans had kids. They agreed on a lot of things. There were pro-gun Democrats, there were pro-gun Republicans, there were Republicans who thought we should have fewer guns, there were Democrats who thought likewise. And you could go down the list of hot-button political issues, but now they've been so polarized. But one of the things that's been most interesting to me to observe is that the immigrant communities continue to have significant family size, but native-born Americans, the only ones I know who have a positive birth rate above replacement rate, they tend to be right-wing. And the more religious they are, the more kids they seem to be having. We run an explicitly conservative Christian practice, and we've got families with 10 or 11 kids. Even if the modern American man on average is emasculated, I sort of think the writing's on the wall. The only people having children are very committed to normal masculinity, healthy masculinity, which means protecting women and children and little boys from this kind of depravity. Have you seen this as well? Did your research turn this up at all? This is going to be solved by just demographic shifts over time.

I hadn't got into that, but you raise a lot of interesting points. I mean, all my life I worried about overpopulation, and it's only in the last few years that declining birth rates were even on my radar. This kind of evil has a way of working itself out. Evil is the rot that sets in when institutions don't do their jobs.

So that's interesting you put it that way. I almost view it as the rot that sets into institutions inevitably. I mean, I just think about the fact that Harvard and Yale were started as Christian institutions with the best of intentions of the founders, no matter what their personal morality may have been or the circumstances of their lives or the time they lived in. And yet they're the total opposite of what they were founded to be at this point in most respects. I'm glad it's all going to sort out. I'm embarrassed as an American that it's happened at all. I hope people have enjoyed this. I hope you'll comment on it if you did, and if you're glad I did this, because it's the sort of thing that business advisor would say, we shouldn't do that because it's not going to be good for your bottom line. But I really don't think that's what this is about. It's about being of service to people and helping them understand sex, gender. These are such critical things for them to understand. And I hope people will be able to send this to people who haven't heard this side of the topic in the conversation to wake them up to the fact that this is really wicked and evil and needs to be stopped. Any closing thoughts, Patrick?

Uh, yeah, I would encourage people— I'm about to utter the dirtiest phrase in the English language— do your own research and look into this. Peek behind the curtain and see. We treat these people like they're 10 feet tall. They're not. They're a bunch of frightened old men and they're, they're bullies. And the thing about bullies, not all bullies snarl and sneer. Some of the most dangerous bullies speak indulgent tones, talk about gender-affirming care and accepting kids as they are. In Tennessee, they stood up to these bullies and they folded without even putting up a fight. They shut down the gender identity clinic at Vanderbilt University. And yeah, so that's my, my message to listeners is be optimistic. Most people really are good at heart.

I recently released a podcast episode with my friend Justin Harvey, who was instrumental in getting the fluoride out of the water in Florida, and he's now taking on hyperscaler AI data centers and FLOT cameras. And I would encourage people who want to get involved, become active. I would encourage all of you to do that in some way, to go listen to that episode because we actually did lay out how a lot of this is controlled at the local level. I honestly, I would have to look, I would be very curious if there's, if there's ways for local municipalities to say, not in our backyard. Yes, you may be the big academic medical center. Of the region, but this is disgusting and we're going to have the sheriff come arrest your doctors and your nurses and your OR techs if you're doing this to children in our county or whatever. I don't know how that will all shake out, but I sure hope people get loud and we put a stop to all this. I think just a few people showing up at city council meetings, a few people showing up to the right meetings in these institutions of higher learning, if you can still call them that, I hate to say that, will make all the difference. So I hope we can put all these places out of business and make this a a sad chapter in our history and bring it to a close. Thanks again for joining me, Patrick. Hey, thank you. Thank you for listening to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. If this conversation felt uncomfortably familiar and you're ready for someone to take your story seriously, your next step is to book a call with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Choose a time that works for you and confirm it. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care, and it's not a guarantee of results. It's a calm, structured assessment where we'll create a plan to help you achieve your health goals. We have a limited number of calls available each month, so if you see a time that fits your schedule, book it right away. Again, the link is stillmanmd.com/call. .com. If you find this podcast helpful, subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with a friend or family member who needs help getting their health back. I'm Dr. Leland Stillman. Thank you for listening, and until next time, be well.